Partner Article

The single EU digital market's green field

This week we welcomed eleven new starters to our London office, we’re on a serious recruitment drive at Ve Interactive. Strong leadership and governance are behind our year-on-year growth and success to date. (That and no VC involvement). And we are building for the long term, to give everybody involved in Ve a sustainable working life.

Good business practice and innovation are two of the ways in which we are doing this to future proof our company, as well as helping us to continually meet our clients’ demands. We have always worked towards being leaders and game changers. Whilst copying another company’s business model might be a safe way to operate for some, it limits your growth potential and without subsequent innovation you will eventually have to put restrictive parameters in place.

And there’s good reason for Ve’s continual innovation. As Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda said in her speech today: A Single Telecom Market for Growth and Jobs in Europe - “the whole economy craves connectivity.” Indeed by the end of this year, there will be as many connected devices in the world as there are people {Source: Cisco}.

The UK is well placed to take advantage of this revolution. We came 7th in the World Economic Forum’s 2012 Global Competitiveness Rankings for technological readiness and we have one of the most sophisticated e-commerce markets in the world, making up one third of the whole EU e-commerce market. However, it is vital that players in the UK information economy are effective and ethical in managing the complex privacy and security challenges in it, if we are to grow the eco-system and gain the consumer trust that it depends on.

Recently we highlighted some of the irresponsible behaviour going on behind the scenes in the performance marketing industry. As everyone knows, unethical corporate behaviour can affect consumer purchase decisions as the recent horse meat scandal illustrated, but to date there has not been much of a platform for businesses to compare and contrast the ethical behaviour of third party digital companies they are considering working with.

But who knows, may be the fallout from Prism will start to wake brands up to some of the weak governance going on, especially where serious issues like consumer protection are concerned? And then headway will be made for our industry to concentrate on shaping the opportunity-strewn, green field of the single EU digital market, and the building of tomorrow’s economy.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Kathy Heslop .