Yespo at Innowave Summit 2023, Varna, Bulgaria

In Varna, Bulgaria, Innowave Summit 2023 took place on November 17th and 18th. It is known to be the country's premier digital event. One of the most important technology conferences in Southeastern Europe, Innowave Summit concentrates on the digital transformation of the public and private sectors.

The conference aims to investigate advancements in numerous dynamic industries, including marketing, sales, ecommerce, and more. The primary objective is to foster innovative action and creative thought. In brief, Innowave Summit 2023 is about:

• Over 150 inspiring speakers and topics.
• Hundreds of meetings, networking, conversations, and new business opportunities.
• 500 stands and over 5,000 visitors from Bulgaria and the world.

What Was This Year’s Summit About?

This year, Innowave Summit had 7 EXPO zones with over 120 booths from well-known technology companies worldwide. These zones included engaging panel discussions, workshops, and new ideas from the digital front.

The main topics covered were:

• Business development
• Marketing
• Ecommerce
• Innovation & tech
• AI

What Have We Done at the Innowave Summit This Year?

This year, over 5,000 people, from regular specialists to C-level execs and top politicians, attended the conference. They represented small and medium businesses, multibillion corporations, the government, and more. They spent two days forging new connections, sharing their experience, and learning about the latest trends.

Yespo is no exception. Multiple team members attended Innowave Summit 2023, including our CEO, Dmytro Kudrenko, and COO, Alex Danchenko.

We had the pleasure of sharing the space with such industry giants as Google Cloud, SAP Bulgaria, InteractAge, McKinsey, NetPeak, Catalyst, InfoPulse, and more.

Apart from having a stand where we exchanged ideas about omnichannel marketing with other attendees and showcased our solution, we were actively participating in the event. Dmytrо Kudrenko conducted a workshop on gamification, discussing its significance and effectiveness in 2024. On the first day, Alex Danchenko gave a presentation and participated in a discussion panel on ecommerce trends on the second day.

What Did Yespo’s Team Members Discuss?

Among the first speakers of the conference was Alex Danchenko with a presentation titled “The power of Customer Data: Personalization best practices to boost ecommerce sales.” He focused on the best industry practices and the latest case studies from the clients of Yespo. Alex provided stats on the Bulgarian market, and from there, he went on to cover how data can be used to personalize customer experience.

I chose to focus on the power of customer data. As a leader at Yespo, an omnichannel CDP, we help businesses utilize the ubiquity of customer data to make marketing communications and customer experience more effective and data-driven. Recent developments in AI, especially generative AI, offer tremendous opportunities for businesses that properly collect, unify, and process data with CDPs. Imagine how much better your communication can be if your messages are generated based on thousands of data points from customer behavior!

Alex Danchenko, COO, co-founder of Yespo

On the second day, Alex, together with Nikolay Totov from ContactPigeon, and Vlad Stoica from Salesforce, discussed the latest trends, news, and developments in ecommerce. This panel was moderated by Nikola Ilchev, founder of eCommerceAcademyBG.

Our Overall Impressions

The most interesting part was speaking to local people in Varna and the industry leaders. Among the participants, I would surely highlight our colleagues from Netpeak Digital Agency and Ringostat. As these companies are also rooted in Ukraine, it was really great to reunite under such dramatic times our country is going through. I felt a lot of support for my people and my country from many Bulgarians.

Alex Danchenko, COO, co-founder of Yespo

After returning from the conference, we can say that our first visit to Bulgaria was extremely productive, though it lasted only two days. Our team gained a lot of insights from the industry leaders.
Yespo wants to thank the organizers of this amazing event, as well as all participants, for the opportunity to network with so many terrific people.

One of the most fascinating for me was Drayton Bird, a leading authority in direct marketing. His expertise and decades-long career are invaluable. The insight I got from him was very clear. He said, “Any ordinary message at the right moment is better than a great message delivered at the wrong time.” This resonated with me, as effective marketing communication is based on actual behavior and context relevance. A perfect design is never the most important component. This consequently opens a wide road towards marketing automation based on generative AI, where a customer data platform gathers behavioral events and defines the most resonating content. 

 

On the whole, this was my first time in Bulgaria for business reasons, and I'm very impressed with the quality of the organization and the involvement of city officials in the event.

Alex Danchenko, COO, co-founder of Yespo