Innovation and Data - The Promise and The Pitfalls, BEA Keynote

This morning Dominique was part of a panel that opened Book Expo America 2015, talking about the digital transformation and how the data that comes with that change can help drive innovation. The impressive lineup of panelists included:

Scott Galloway, Founder & Chairman of L2, Joanna Stone Herman, Moderator, Co-Founder and CEO of Librify, Dominique Raccah, Publisher and CEO of Sourcebooks, Gareth Cuddy, Founder and CEO of Vearsa, Bethlam Forsa, President of Pearson Learning Services, and Trip Adler, CEO & Co-Founder of Scribd.

Professor Galloway kicked off the event with a 15-minute roller-coaster ride of information about the future of digital. A couple of interesting predictions from him:
In retail

• Amazon is going to decline
• Pure play eCommerce is not going to work anymore
• Retailers are going to be regrowing
• The future of retail looks more like Macy’s

Social Media

• Facebook did a bait and switch with their community and advertisers and they are winning the war of content and audience
• Facebook is likely to disrupt YouTube

Brands

• Apple is the best luxury brand right now
• If you want to learn about retail and global management, watch what luxury brands do

From there the panel discussed data. Our conversation ranged over the power of data and how it’s being used in various publishing businesses today, some of the limitations of the data available to us now, the biggest innovations happening across the industry and how our industry compares to others, as well as conversation and predictions around the next 5 years of the book publishing business.

The panel was filmed by CSPAN and we will update with a link to the video as soon as it becomes available.