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This March 18th– 21st Kelkoo Group sponsored Adweek Live, the European media event for agencies, journalists, e-commerce bods and digital nomads held at the Picture House in Piccadilly Circus, London. This year was the first time that we attended AdWeek Live, with our event “Monopolies: Should we be Worried?” kicking off the discussions held on Tuesday morning.
Looking to pursue a different kind of event, we partnered with Tortoise Media who offered us a different kind of newsroom experience. Famed for their sessions, or ‘Think-Ins’, audience members listen to a panel discussion before being allowed to make statements, as opposed to asking questions. Handouts are provided at the beginning of each session to provide some insight and overview into the market or industry’s current state of affairs (and you can view ours here).
Leading us through this difficult tech-fuelled topic was Tortoise’s chair James Harding, with years of journalistic experience.
Not to mention the input from our varied experts who took it upon themselves to take on why tech giants are more like countries than companies:
Simon Reed, Commercial Director for Kelkoo Group
Andy Hart, C-Suite Business Consultant for Lightharted Holdings
Julia Hobsbawm OBE, Founder of Editorial Intelligence
Jessica Butcher MBE, Co-Founder of Tick and Blippar
So what did we learn from our panel discussion? Well you can view the session in the video below, or read James’s round up notes from our event.
The readout – Monopolies: Should we be worried
Actively. The impact of the tech giants is everywhere – from problems with mental health, screen addiction and narcism to squeezing market competition and consumer choice to denting trust in public safety, capitalism and democratic politics. Everyone is worried, the question is how much – and what to do about it.
It’s appealing to think that this is a problem made by business and one the business, harnessing consumer demand, can solve. No doubt, the big disruptors are themselves ripe for disruption. For consumers, there are already better offers out there on price and privacy.
But some of the issues are going to have to be fixed by government. There’s the issue of tax. There are questions of regulation. There’s plenty to worry about when politicians get involved. They don’t really have the people who understand the dynamic world they’re responsible for governing. Their record of intervention is littered with unintended consequences (viz Google vs Bing) and patchy execution (GDPR). And their philosophy of regulation is retrospective, not future facing and fit for technological innovation. Most problematic, these are national powers trying to wrangle global forces.
Perhaps what should worry us most is that we think about regulating technology in mechanistic ways when the real debate should be about humans and machines. So far, when politicians and regulators have reached for systems to regulate, the machines and the monopolies have fared better than the people.