We just wrapped up two days at Digital Summit Philadelphia, held September 23 and 24 at The Bellevue Hotel. Great sessions, great conversations, and a notebook full of ideas to bring back to Chacka. Here are the ones that really stood out.
Slow Down Where It Matters
Bestselling author Ann Handley opened the summit with “Marketing ASAP: A Smarter Way to Work in an Instant-Results World.” Her case: in an AI world, speed is cheap. The goal isn’t just to be seen anymore, it’s to be chosen. Sometimes slowing down and being more intentional is what actually moves the needle.
Platforms Grade Their Own Homework
Ralph Burns of Tier 11 walked through a case study from an eight-figure pet ecommerce brand. For five straight quarters, the in-platform dashboards reported big wins while the brand missed its forecasts. The fix was to pull back hard on over-credited bottom-funnel spend and move that budget up-funnel into demand creation. On flat spend, net customer acquisition cost dropped from $193 to $109 (about 43%), and the session reported 44% revenue growth.
Creative Diversity Is the New Targeting
Andromeda is Meta’s ads retrieval engine, the first step in ad delivery, where tens of millions of eligible ads get narrowed to the few thousand Meta might show someone. Meta built it to handle the flood of creative coming from Advantage+ and generative AI tools, and to personalize which ads make that cut. The takeaway from the summit: variety in messaging wins the auction. And the best source of that variety? Talking to the people who talk to your customers.
Social Is Now Search
In his session on brand discoverability with GEO and social media, Brent Bowen of Sparkcade Marketing showed how social and PR now play a bigger role in how brands show up in AI-driven search. Captions, on-screen text, and comments act like metadata for both social and AI search. So clarity beats cleverness. Clear first-line context, natural language, and specific details help people and machines understand your brand.
Community Over Customers
In a fireside chat, Jennifer Kavanagh, SVP of Media and Marketing for the Philadelphia Eagles, shared how the team treats fans as a community, not a customer base. They trust their people to move fast, prioritize ideation, and focus on being interesting. One line stuck with us: social media isn’t really social anymore, it’s interest-based.
Test Landing Pages Like a Scientist
Growth often hides in plain sight on the pages you already have. Start with high-traffic, low-conversion landing pages, since people are already showing up and not converting. Then test the friction points: CTAs, imagery, and forms. Even something as small as a button color can move conversions. Never dismiss a small lift, because they compound.
The Real Takeaway
Two days in Philadelphia left us with a notebook full of ideas to bring back to Chacka. Slow down where it counts. Judge your media by what the business actually sees, not what each platform reports. Give the algorithm real variety, write so people and machines can understand you, build community, and test the pages you already have. If you want to talk through what any of this looks like for your brand, get started with your audit and let’s dig in.