Digital Summit Denver 2019 – Event Recap

What do you get when a couple thousand digital marketers come together in the Mile High City?

I had the chance to attend Digital Summit Denver 2019 this week and thought it was worth a quick recap. This is a traveling event that takes place in a few cities each year. While each event varies a bit, if you’re considering attending an upcoming Digital Summit, then this review should give you some info about what to expect.

Summary

The event is 2 days long and kicks off with a half-day workshop on the first morning. There are some additional pre-show activities the day before, but things seem to officially kick off with the workshops. This is followed by a day and a half of educational sessions, with typically 4-6 sessions running concurrently in different rooms. There are a few scheduled networking sessions, but this is largely an educational event, with somewhat limited networking. About 2,000 people seemed to be in attendance in Denver.  While I don’t know for certain what the mix of experience was among attendees, I would say that most people are early to mid-career in marketing.

Highlights

There were definitely some highlights from the event.

• Opening Keynote with Daniel Pink – author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, among other books. He gave a thought-provoking presentation on various aspects of time management, how our minds/attitudes fluctuate during the day, and other interesting items from his research. He’s a very engaging and entertaining speaker, so the session went quickly. I definitely took away a few ideas to try out in my own work scheduling.
• Keynote with Seth Godin – author of numerous books (Permission Marketing, Tribes, etc.) and marketing guru. Seth is always an interesting guy to listen to. He’s very sharp and brings a lot of creativity to the marketing arena. His session was structured as a Q&A with the audience simply asking him questions the entire time. Interesting format, but entirely reliant on those attendees to ask good questions. There were some thought-provoking subjects discussed, along with a few that didn’t resonate all that much. Overall an interesting session, with a very sharp speaker.
• Several sessions on Email Marketing. I can’t pick one out in particular, but there were more than 5 sessions that focused on various aspects of email marketing. No earth shattering, brilliant ideas, but some solid tactics suggested in all of them.
• Several sessions on SEO and SEM. I definitely snagged a few tactical suggestions from the sessions on Search Marketing. The presenters were experienced pros in the SEO and SEM arenas and they shared a number of good tips. (At least they seem like good tips!) I’ll be implementing a few of them on this very website.

Lowlights

• No event app. It’s odd to find an event these days that doesn’t have at least a cursory mobile app for attendees to use to check the agenda, etc. But, there simply wasn’t any app in this case. They could really make the event more valuable by creating an app that not only includes the agenda, maps, etc. but also has attendee profiles and helps foster more networking before and during the event.
• A few sessions underwhelmed. As is always the case with an event with multiple speakers/sessions, some are stronger than others. In this case, there were definitely a few events that just didn’t connect for me. They were either a bit too general or they simply didn’t tell me anything new.

Verdict

• For the price (just a few hundred $ for a basic pass) it’s a solid show, especially if it happens to be in your backyard. It isn’t one I would consider traveling for, but if it’s just a 30 minute drive from home, then it’s more than worth the time and expense.

You can check out info on other upcoming shows for the OPTIZMO team on our event page.