With an emphasis on how the industry can #ShapeTheFuture, this year’s IMPACT was, “focused not just on pondering the way things are, but the way they should be going forward,” as MMA North America board member, Kristi Argyilan of Target, said during her opening remarks.

Here are ten rapid-fire takeaways to help build the capabilities you’ll need:

1. Be Fast: Marketers need a first-second strategy, according to a new Cognition Neuroscience Study the MMA unveiled at IMPACT. Said MMA’s Vassilis Bakopoulos,. “We think we have time -- and the truth is we don’t. [Marketers] have less than one second to make a first impression.” Read the story about the study in The Wall Street Journal and learn more here.
    
2. Know Your Competition: Many speakers emphasized that enterprises need to know who their competition is – it may not be obvious. Crayola’s Josh Kroo said, “The truth is we’re competing for kids’ free time … That’s the frame of reference that we have.” Or, your competitor could be your past. Said MMA CEO Greg Stuart: “I am no longer competing against my competitors. I’m competing against the marketer I was yesterday.”
    

3. Don’t Be Disrupted: Jonathan Beamer, CMO of original dot-com Monster, admitted: “We let others disrupt the original disruptor”. A panel on how mobile apps are changing the world focused on disruptors in healthcare, among them the company OmniLife.ai, which is using intelligent technology to reduce the waste of donated organs.
    
4. Stay Human: Don’t forget that, as a marketer, you’re not dealing with consumers, but people. Today, this often means using technology for personalization. Estée Lauder’s Ophelia Ceradini discussed how the company’s brands focus on the human touch its founder started in 1946. It employs services, that, for instance, allow users to upload photos and get a personal diagnosis of their skin type.
    
5. Connect the Dots: At a breakfast updating marketers and MMA members on the MATT (Marketing Attribution Think Tank) initiative, Joel Rubinson, who is leading MATT for the MMA, unveiled results from the most recent marketer benchmark study; It shows how intently some marketers are tracking the customer journey – a trend to watch. Companies who have fully adopted an attribution process, some 49 percent of their ad dollars are covered by MTA modeling.
    

6. Exceed Expectations: Consumers have ever-heightening expectations for customer interaction, and the phenomenon is category- and platform-agnostic. Subway Chief Digital Officer Carissa Ganelli, showcased the QSR’s portfolio of mobile efforts, which includes an ordering interface that borrows the swipe-right or swipe-left functionality of Tinder. Don’t want olives in your sandwich? Swipe left!
    
7. Find Partners: It’s crucial to find partners who can propel your business forward. Humana’s Jeff Reid emphasized how its partnerships with Fitbit, Kroger’s, and Garmin are helping its customers toward wellness goals. For Crayola, a co-branded line of Clinique lipsticks has proven a fun way to build the brand beyond kids, and Mountain Dew discovered the perfect marketing partner in the AMC series The Walking Dead benefiting from the audience overlap between the two brands.
    
8. Fund Women: Nisha Dua, partner and founder of BBG (Built By Girls) Ventures, gave an insider’s perspective on the female-led businesses BBG has funded, 61 in all. Women tend to look for an organic market fit, she emphasized, and pitch what’s achievable now -- their spin on entrepreneurialism is catching notice. ”We are seeing a tidal wave of female founders who are founding billion dollar businesses,” she said.
    

9. Try Out New Tech: Impact is always a guide to how marketers are embracing new technologies. Voice technology is now pervasive, with companies ranging from sleep technology company Eight Sleep to GE, well, talking it up. Pepsico’s Kate Brady demonstrated how Mountain Dew uses VR to bring its fans once-in-a-lifetime experiences, and Subway and 1800Flowers showcased their uses of Rich Communication Services (basically next-gen SMS).
    
10. 5G Will #ShapeTheFuture: VMLY&R’s Michael Stich pointed one direction the future will definitely take us … and it’s called 5G. Stich sketched out a world in which ”increasingly intelligent and aware devices … know not only what surrounds them but what surrounds you.”

We hope these takeaways help make the difficult job of constantly evolving easier. As Harvard’s Sunil Gupta said of business transformation during his presentation, “It’s like changing the engine of a plane while it’s flying.”