IKEA, Electronic Arts and Other Global Brands Share How They Are Responding to Market Changes by Launching New Digital-First Experiences With Contentful

“Fast Forward,” the conference on accelerating digital innovation, will feature brands known for cutting-edge digital experiences

Contentful, the leading content platform for digital-first businesses, announced its Fast Forward customer conference lineup featuring some of the world’s most innovative brands. More than 1,500 digital leaders and builders will attend the free virtual conference Oct. 29. They will learn how to build for the digital-first era and rapidly adapt to digital demands driven by the ongoing pandemic and rising customer expectations.

Featured speakers from leading global brands and digital agencies include IKEA, Lyft, Atlassian, EA, Appnovation and Valtech. The conference focuses on how leading brands innovate and deliver digital experiences, to stay ahead of competitors and rising customer expectations. These brands are successfully closing the “Digital Innovation Gap” by adopting a new digital playbook and set of tools to enable their builders. A recently released survey commissioned by Contentful revealed a gap between consumer demands for digital-first experiences and brands’ capabilities to deliver.

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Digital teams at IKEA found new ways to collaborate and form stronger connections with customers through digital channels.

“Collaboration is key to innovation. Aligning our digital teams across geographies and product categories on a unified content platform was the essential collaboration needed to reimagine our catalog for a valuable, cohesive customer journey,” said Jonatan Söderlind, Product Owner, IKEA. At the conference, he will describe how the team iterated, tested and ultimately drove greater business results with the risky but ultimately rewarding strategy of transforming the legendary catalog into an all-digital experience.

“IKEA has redefined the digital experience for its customers,” said Abhishek Kumar, Consulting Manager, Deloitte Digital for IKEA. “More brands need to emulate this approach to keep up with ever-increasing consumer expectations in the new digital-first era.”

Contentful is a pioneer and global leader in headless content management systems (CMS), and is now leading the industry with its next-generation content platform, which accelerates digital delivery at every stage — faster set-up, quicker time to value and the flexibility and extensibility brands need to scale.

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Fast Forward is the customer conference hosted by Contentful. The dual-track digital event includes a 5-hour program and hands-on workshops. It is sponsored by AWS, Smartling, AKQA, HUGE and R/GA.

“Brands have been forced to throw out multi-year plans for building digital capabilities, in favor of a new, accelerated digital playbook,” said Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful. “Fast Forward is a conference that delivers a more nimble digital playbook, ready for the realities of customer demand and competition in 2021. We’ve geared this conference to help digital leaders and builders adapt at the speed of digital.”

“It’s all about building great customer experiences,” said Ivo Bronsveld, Head of Integrations at Contentful’s partner, Commercetools. “We recently launched the MACH Alliance, together with Contentful and other industry leaders, to help educate our customers on the benefits of headless architecture and a best-of-breed approach. Commercetools’ integration on Contentful’s App Framework makes it easier and more flexible for digital teams to build out these experiences.”

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