Day 1 MACHN 2025: The festival for tech, business and art

Over 70 speakers, over 2500 participants, and over 100 sessions. This is what awaited us at MACHN 2025. We were live again this year and bring you a summary of our learnings!

Table of Contents

• From LinkedIn to Thought Leadership: How Influencers are Revolutionizing B2B Communication

• Breaking Structures: What Design Does Our New Planetary Reality Need?

• Unicorns in the East? On Global Ambitions, Negotiating with Investors, and Social Responsibility

• Regional Reach, Big Impact – Social Media Marketing for Regional Heroes

• How f****d is the Creative Industry? 7 Theses on the Future of the Communication Industry

• Customer Access is the New Gold – Marketing 2025 Needs New Strategies

• Feeling Guides Focus: Why Knowledge of Emotions Must be Part of Rational Decision-Making Processes

• Vanity Metrics - Why False Numbers Prevent Real Impact

• Potential of Quantum Technologies

After standing relatively long at the entrance last year, I arrive an hour earlier this year and am positively surprised. The accreditation process is quick and smooth, within minutes I am on the festival grounds. The Baumwollspinnerei is just as beautiful as in previous years. The weather is warm, the day promising.

From LinkedIn to Thought Leadership: How Influencers are Revolutionizing B2B Communication

I start my MACHN after an extensive exploration of the premises at the lecture by Monty Weber and Jörg Fieback on the topic 'From LinkedIn to Thought Leadership'. Here, the focus is mainly on the fact that brands are heard less than people and that it is still important to personally interact with fellow human beings.

My Learnings?

• Individuals and personal networks enhance credibility.
• Authenticity is a recurring theme here and in many other presentations. Additionally, both speakers emphasize a consistent level of activity.
• People scroll through 96 meters of LinkedIn feeds per day. If you don't actively stop them, you'll get lost.
• 82% of people find influencer marketing appealing. This number surprises me in particular. However, qualified influencers also provide relevance, expertise, reach, and engagement.

Breaking Structures: What Design Does Our New Planetary Reality Need?

After the exciting start, I make my way to the Speakers Corner. Here I listen to Prof. Dr. Maja Göpel on the topic 'Structures breaking: What design does our new planetary reality need?'. Her way of talking about changes impresses me. Objective and yet very interesting, close to people and close to the matter.

My Learnings?

• Not everything has to work forever. But we need to regularly question whether it still does. And if not, why not? And what needs to be done to get back to a functioning system?
• Structural change, like many other processes, takes time and does not proceed in a straight line. There are so-called Tipping Points where it is decided whether a change occurs or not.
• A system is well designed when the people who make profits from it are also the ones who have to deal with the difficulties of the projects. Green energy, for example, can only be successfully implemented by many private actors if those who contribute to the system also actively benefit.

Following the lecture and discussion, I go on another short exploration tour of the area. For lunch, there's pizza. It's not particularly big, but it tastes very good.

Unicorns in the East? On Global Ambitions, Negotiating with Investors, and Social Responsibility

Around 1 pm, I find myself back at the Speakers Corner. Here, Martin Böhringer from Staffbase talks about 'Unicorns in the East' and global ambitions.

My Learnings?

• Communication within teams is not only necessary for planning and preparing events, launches, and other internal topics. It is also a tool to retain, inform, and promote employees.
• For Martin, a startup does not mean a 'young company', but primarily 'growth ambitions'. And they have them, despite already having 800 employees.
• The best way to find talents for the team is to select people with passion. Knowledge can be taught, but curiosity must already be brought by employees.

Regional Reach, Big Impact - Social Media Marketing for Local Heroes

At 1:30 PM, Anika Luthardt continues with "Regional Reach, Big Impact". She explains to the audience at the Creative Stage that reach is created where courage and creative ideas meet.

My Learnings?

• Topics that perform well in regional apps are seasonal content, food, aesthetics, and event tips.
• The strategies she recommends include: short-form videos, brand ambassadors, regular A/B tests, and a focus on the community.
• Success comes from approachability and authenticity, as well as a well-structured editorial plan. Content should be kept in the appropriate format and tailored to the platform.

How f****d is the Creative Industry? 7 Theses on the Future of the Communication Industry

The next presentation was one of my absolute favorites. Also on the Creative Stage, Jonas Kratz talks about what the future of the creative industry looks like in the AI environment. He divides everything into 3 acts and 7 theses.

My Learnings?

• Creative routine tasks will be easier and faster to accomplish in the future. This is bad for the people who earn their living from it. Often, these are beginners in the profession. However, if they no longer learn the basics, but are increasingly placed in curation positions, knowledge will be lost in the long term.
• The daily average screen time is 6:40 hours. However, AI has multiplied the amount of content that we can (and "should") consume in this time. There is no time left to watch everything. That's why indicators are needed to determine which content is worth displaying. Perhaps the most important of these is quality.
• In the future, the creatives who can iterate, adapt and process the content of an AI well will be successful. People who are able to create something new and individual out of a jumble of concepts.

Customer access is the new gold - Marketing 2025 needs new strategies

My journey continues at 3 pm to the MACHN Stage. Here I see Rolf Hermann, who will talk about customer access as the new gold. He looks into the marketing crystal ball and brings updates from product announcements and rollouts of major companies.

My learnings?

• I found it particularly interesting how Google Overview is changing search in the SEO area. Since potential customers no longer have to find their answers in blog posts, but come across them directly, content needs to be rethought in a new and different way. Companies are reportedly experiencing up to an 85% decrease in reach. On average, it's 40%.
• Brands are being seen less and less. As a result, the traditional funnel is crumbling. It is all the more important for a brand to be mentally present with potential customers - so that they already know where they want to go before they search.
• A good way to reach Gen Z is TikTok. On average, young people spend 4-6 hours here daily. Brand awareness can also be built here apart from Google search.

Feeling controls focus: Why knowledge about emotions must be part of rational decision-making processes

After this lecture, I watch Dr. Marie Luise Schreiter at the Innovation Stage at 4 p.m. She talks about 'Feeling controls focus' and brings an interesting, neuroscientific perspective to the topic of marketing.

My Learnings?

• Psychology has long treated emotions as drives and lower forms of thinking. Nowadays, it is known that thoughts (cognitions) are based on emotions and are colored by them. Rationality and emotions cannot be decoupled.
• How we perceive stimuli is based on our environment and our previous experiences. The context strongly influences how we think and feel. Often, we only look for justifications for our thoughts and feelings afterwards, instead of building them up rationally.
• We see the world as we are, not as it is. For example, people with trauma experiences tend to interpret neutrality more negatively.

Vanity Metrics - why false numbers prevent real impact

At 4:30 pm, I then went to Ideenplanet Ost, where I listened to Marc Rosenkranz on the topic of 'Vanity Metrics'. He explained why likes, shares, and others do not represent a meaningful method to measure success.

My Learnings?

• Customers mainly buy from brands they trust. However, attention and appreciation are very difficult to measure values. That's why we use surrogate metrics. But if we rely on these, we run the risk of chasing prestige instead of real achievements.
• 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' - Goodhart's Law. If you optimize for likes, likes can no longer be used as a reliable measure of engagement because they have been distorted by the optimization intervention. Then they are no longer good predictors for other, more abstract values. This principle can be applied to all 'simple' values (e.g. dwell time or comments) that are measured to predict complex values (e.g. loyalty or enthusiasm).
• Good metrics are measurable, influencable, correlate with the outcome being tested, are robust against manipulation, and can be measured in a timely manner.

Potential of Quantum Technologies

After this presentation, I further explored the Innovation Area and learned a lot about interesting scientific projects: for example, ice made from algae and the connection between Extended Reality and microscope technology.
Day 1 ended for me with the presentation by Markus Krutzik and Marius Grundmann on the MACHN-Stage on the topic 'Potential of Quantum Technologies'. They talked about various application areas of this fascinating technology: from measurement to communication to data processing.

My Learnings?

• Quantum technology already plays a role in many everyday devices, especially those from the first generation. These include, for example, mobile phones and cameras. But also in the GPS area and in gravitational measurement devices, quantum technology finds applications.
• SaxonQ is working on industrial-grade 'mini' quantum computers: small enough to fit in a cabinet under a desktop. Cost? Currently just under a million euros.