BAM revives IAB Belgium

First of all, can you remind BAM members of the historical ties between BAM and IAB?

Fleur Parnet: BAM was created in 2017 from the merger of several trade associations including IAB Belgium. Three different entities were integrated into BAM and each association came with its own 'legacy', DNA and members. Since then, from BAM, we try to inform, educate and provide networking opportunities to our community of over 5,800 members. For IAB, we made the choice to make the IAB MIXX Awards the sole focus. We will of course continue to focus on the IAB MIXX Awards, but we are now expanding the activities.

What prompted you to focus more on this community?

Benjamin Sekkai: The goal is to bring the IAB brand and its community back to the forefront in Belgium. At BAM, activities were still happening around digital themes. Just think of the Think Tank MarTech. However, there was no longer a one-stop brand as there used to be.

And today people don't always know where to turn when, I'm just saying, a new report comes out about the new IAB standard formats. After a strategic reflection with BAM's CEO and executive committee, we decided to respond to the needs of the market and once again create a strong anchor around the Belgian digital community. In other words, we are setting our sights on a revival of IAB Belgium.

From where does this market demand come?

Benjamin Sekkai: Everyone knows that digital is becoming more and more complex, more and more segmented and with more and more categories. First of all, there are the advertisers. Today, the role of a marketer has changed significantly. The marketer in 2025 has become both marketing director, project manager, digital jack-of-all-trades and entertainer. The two big pillars in marketing today are digitalization and “to do good. At agencies, in turn, there is a need for standards. They need guidance because things are evolving at lightning speed. For example, there is retail media that is being talked about a lot at the moment. Standards are much needed, otherwise everyone just does something and it becomes problematic, both for the end consumer and the advertiser.

Fleur Parnet: At the recent BAM Marketing Congress, I heard a speaker say that there are as many as 14,000 digital tools available to the marketer worldwide. In Belgium, you also have an exponential number of tools that the marketer should know about. Just stand in the shoes of an agency or a marketer. Eventually, you no longer know which tool is more important than the other and how to make them complementary to each other. So both marketers and agencies need guidance and to be informed about these tools.

Benjamin Sekkai: That is a very pertinent point. Everyone knows the tools of the big players (Amazon, Meta, Google, ...), but not always the tools of local Belgian players. However, they can be extremely relevant. It is therefore BAM's mission to support the Belgian ecosystem.

Guidance and information, in other words. What initiatives are you taking specifically?

Fleur Parnet: There are three parts. The first component consists of events including, of course, the IAB MIXX Awards. We do this because there is a clear need from the community of experts to come together in an informal context. This is why we are announcing the relaunch of IAB Belgium on February 11 with a keynote by Daniel Knapp (IAB Europe) and a panel discussion on retail media with advertisers, distributors, agencies and tool development companies. This event will take place at Publicis Groupe at Tour & Taxis. We are also launching events to revitalize the community, such as the IAB café, which will be called IAB 5@7.

Benjamin Sekkai: This event will help to signify IAB Belgium within BAM, but also to launch a call so that we acquire new candidates to strengthen the community. Today there is a new generation that is also interested in contributing to the digital ecosystem in Belgium.

Fleur Parnet: The second part is content. We want to be a guide to what exists on the market and what should be prioritized. In short, to be a curator in terms of content. Our ambition is not to rewrite everything, but to collect accompanying articles, standards, ... in a central place and make them available to our members.

Finally, there is the training aspect. Here, too, it is not the intention to create new training courses, but rather to make the many training courses that already exist within IAB Europe available to our members. This will allow us to enrich the training courses organized from BAM around technology, data and digital.

To what extent is there a need for local insights?

Benjamin Sekkai: In time, we also want to create local content and share it with the market. This of course requires editorial work and energy from the teams, but I feel there is a lot of goodwill to start a kind of knowledge hub. The figures from the UK, France and Europe are often available, but in presentations and lectures on certain topics I often miss figures and insights from the Belgian market. We are a special little country and have the ability to be more resourceful and technical than many people think. The work realized by some agencies and start-ups in Belgium is really impressive considering the size of our country.

Fleur Parnet: It is often said that Belgium is “lagging behind” when it comes to digital adoption. If you look at the development of technical tools, this is less the case than it was 10 to 15 years ago. In some ways, however, it is also an advantage to know 'what is coming'. We know what works and can therefore avoid the shortcomings of certain tools. So it is our ingenuity that is going to help us, which is exactly why it is so important to have a network of experts who regularly share their experiences.

We need to talk about IAB's flagship event, the MIXX Awards. Are there any changes in the pipeline?

Benjamin Sekkai: The IAB MIXX Awards is basically the only activity that BAM has always kept under the IAB umbrella. Last year was the first year after the corona pandemic that we could start with a really clean slate and the renewal of the event (the platform, the jury, the categories, ... were completely redesigned, nvdr.) turned out to be a great success. There were twice as many registered cases as the year before and we welcomed a record number of visitors to the event.

So we are not going to change anything about the new format. You don't change a winning team! We do take into account feedback about the categories. At the 2024 edition, there were a total of 24 categories that were much better defined than before. Participants thus understood better than other years which category their case belonged in. Certain categories were less well known than others, though, and may need to be better communicated. We will group some categories together, such as SEO and SEA. But apart from a few minor adjustments, nothing will change.

The IAB MIXX Awards in Belgium are modeled after the IAB MIXX Awards Europe. We have seen what works well internationally and given it a Belgian twist. The goal is obviously homogeneity, but also to make it easier to highlight Belgian cases abroad and to submit the best Belgian cases for the IAB MIXX Awards Europe.

Are you also strengthening ties with IAB Europe?

Fleur Parnet: IAB Europe is a great structure where there is a lot of work being done and we really appreciate it. The organization has different working groups where they bring experts together to work on the famous IAB standards. They also work around sustainability and that is something that we have hooked our cart on through our Think Tank around sustainability. In fact, a member of our Think Tank is part of this working group. We have already worked within BAM on the link between digital and sustainability and we want to go even further and offer more answers to the market. The second working group within IAB Europe that we are involved in deals with retail media. This is a really big topic within marketing that concerns both advertisers and agencies. Retail media will also be at the center of our event on Feb. 11!

Any final word on BAM's 2025 strategy?

Fleur Parnet: Technology will be central to BAM's strategy. We will shape this by investing in three T's: Technology, Talent & Trust. Regarding 'Technology', we are betting on our MarTech community that will also be involved in IAB's activities. 'Talent' is stimulated by the many training courses within BAM. Finally, 'Trust' contains all the important themes and topics that contribute to making the marketing metier trustworthy, thanks to our content strategy and the thorough work of our expert groups. We know how important that last 't' is to the end consumer. We rely on all the experts and volunteers in our ecosystem to pragmatically achieve this mission.