Playing the percentages. How to give your MWC27 speaker submission the best chance of success

Away from the desk, I’m a grassroots football coach.

I love it. It anchors my week. The park life gives me a sense of enormous wellbeing.

But as much as I’d love my team to play like prime Barcelona, sometimes you have to know what you have to work with, what you’re up against, and what you can realistically do to give yourself the best chance of success. Sometimes you have to just play the percentages.

There’s a similar mindset required when I come back to the desk to work with clients on their MWC speaker submissions.

If you are Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm or one of the other staple companies, you are not starting from the same position as everyone else. Your brand is already familiar, your senior leaders are obvious draws, and you probably have multiple spokespeople, customers and stories you can credibly put forward.

Not everyone has that luxury, and while that does not mean there’s no chance, it does mean you need to recognise the odds and make every part of the submission you can control work as hard as possible.

And with MWC27 speaker submissions open until 5 November, now is the time to start.

A look at the odds

MWC26 attracted roughly 100,000 attendees alongside 3,000 exhibitors, sponsors and partners. GSMA’s post-event figures reference more than 1,700 speakers and thought leaders.

On the face of it, that last number sounds pretty encouraging. More than 1,700 people speaking at an event with around 100,000 attendees works out at roughly one speaker for every 60 people through the door.

But it would be a mistake to think there are 1,700 equivalent opportunities to secure an MWC conference slot. Those speakers were spread across 24 stages and a much broader ecosystem of content. That includes the core MWC conference, industry summits, 4YFN, Connected Industries, partner programmes and other specialist stages. 4YFN alone had more than 300 speakers last year.

Look specifically at the core conference and the number is very different. GSMA describes that programme as typically featuring 350+ speakers, 40+ keynotes and more than 50 conference sessions.

So the relevant number for most companies aspiring to the main conference is not really 1,700. It is closer to 350. And even then, that significantly overstates the number of places actually up for grabs.

The window gets smaller quite quickly

Start with those 40+ keynote positions.

MWC26’s keynote roster included the CEOs of AT&T, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm, BT, Nokia, Orange and Telefónica, among others.

Those are not really the people you should expect to easily displace with a particularly well-written 200-word application.

Then you’ve got policymakers, academics, analysts and moderators within the programme.

And, of course, there is repeat representation.

The headline speaker number does not mean 350 different companies each get one person on stage. Huawei, for example, had double-digit speaker representation across the agenda. Telefónica, AT&T and other major groups also appeared through multiple executives and subject-matter experts.

You are not only competing with telecoms companies either

I’ve said before that ‘Mobile’ World Congress is becoming a bit of a misnomer. As the GSMA continues to try and grow the event, ‘Connectivity World Congress’ is probably more accurate.

Over the last four years, the percentage of attendees coming from industries adjacent to the core mobile ecosystem has been north of 50%, and you can see that mirrored clearly in the speaker line-ups.

Recent MWC programmes have featured names from Netflix, Maersk, Vattenfall, TIME, Agility Robotics, Mistral AI, Amazon, Blizzard Entertainment, ŌURA and Formula E, alongside prominent voices from sport, aviation, healthcare, finance etc.

Again, this makes complete sense. Connectivity increasingly underpins all of those industries, and widening the audience gives more people a reason to come to Barcelona, which is good for the GSMA in the long run.

But that means you are not simply competing against your three nearest competitors for space on the agenda. You are competing against the airport, the football club, the bank, the healthcare provider, the AI company or whatever other company gives MWC an opportunity to demonstrate its relevance outside telecoms.

Everyone submitting thinks they are innovative and almost everyone in Barcelona can make some claim to connectivity.

If it is that hard, why bother?

Corr alright Debby Downer!

I’m not saying don’t submit. Firstly, applying is free and if you don’t submit, your chance of being selected is exactly zero.

As the old saying goes, you can’t win the raffle if you do not buy a ticket.

I’m saying all this because a decent company, a senior job title and a topical subject are not automatically enough when there are thousands of speaker submissions for a handful of slots.

So, how do you play the percentages?

Be ambitious with the idea, flexible with the format

Don’t get precious about the format.

GSMA accepts submissions for standalone presentations, joint client presentations, demos*, panels, moderator roles and fireside chats. The application also allows you to say that you are happy for your proposal to be considered for other MWC programmes.

Pretty simple, tick the box.

It is also quite open about the fact that it may like the substance of a submission without using it exactly as proposed. Its content team says proposals are often used as inspiration and adapted in terms of topic or format. If you apply with an idea for a standalone talk and get offered a relevant panel instead, that is success, so don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

*Also, as an aside, a SaaS demo presented with a fairly mundane video or via a slide deck is not particularly interesting, so if you’re going to bank on a demo, think about what is actually an interesting demonstration.

Match the themes, then go further

You should absolutely understand the MWC27 themes and make it clear where your proposal fits, but remember every other serious applicant has access to the same themes.

If you read ‘AI in Action’ and decide to submit a talk about how AI is transforming telecommunications, you can safely assume you will not be the only person to have had that idea.

Ask tougher questions about what your speaker can credibly tell an audience about this subject that someone else can’t.

Real results from something you have deployed, a mistake you learned from (too few companies openly talk about those), proprietary data, a conclusion that challenges the general industry view, a customer prepared to explain what happened from their side.

If you can remove your company’s name from the submission, replace it with a competitor and leave everything else virtually unchanged, well then you ain’t getting’ picked.

Proof > prediction

Predictions are ten a penny at MWC.

We are going to hear plenty about what AI will do, how networks will evolve and why the next generation of connectivity will transform industry. Proof is much more valuable. GSMA’s own guidance asks applicants for practical and scalable use cases, success stories, tangible partnerships and strong statistics on ROI or societal impact. It specifically highlights the impact of presenting alongside a customer.

You might not have the logo recognition of the big guys, but you may have a genuinely interesting deployment. You might have numbers nobody else has, or you might be able to talk honestly about what worked, what did not and what somebody trying the same thing tomorrow should do differently.

Move the conversation from ‘we think’ to ‘we did’ where you can.

Bring the customer

Everyone expects a vendor to say its own technology is brilliant. A customer willing to say what actually happened is inherently more interesting. Even better if you can put them on stage alongside the people who helped make it happen.

Now you have a real case study, another perspective and potentially another company, industry or geography for the GSMA to put on the programme.

Have those conversations early.

Think carefully about who you put forward

MWC is still full of white men in blue blazers. (Yes, I appreciate a bit of the irony here, but I have a lovely pink blazer thank you very much...)

That is hardly unique to MWC, or to telecoms, but the GSMA has been pretty explicit about wanting a more diverse programme. More than 40% of MWC25 speakers were women, and its speaker guidance encourages diversity across gender, geography, backgrounds and industries.

That does not mean submitting a woman because she is a woman, or putting forward somebody who knows less about the subject because you think it might tick a box.

But it should make companies question the automatic assumption that the CEO has to be the speaker.

If your CEO is another white man in a blue blazer, assess whether you have somebody who can bring equal or greater expertise on the subject to the table. Perhaps the CEO is not your strongest shout.

Make every one of the 200 words work

The submission overview gives you 200 words. That’s not a lot.

So every word has to earn its place.

Within those 200 words you need to communicate what the session is about, why it matters now, what is different about it, what evidence you can bring, why the speaker has the credibility to talk about it and ideally what somebody in the audience will actually learn.

There is no room for padding.

‘An innovative and transformative approach.’

‘A rapidly evolving and increasingly complex landscape.’

‘A unique and compelling opportunity.’

Double adjectives burn words without adding much information.

The same applies to the standard corporate opening:

‘In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, businesses are increasingly looking for innovative solutions…’

Zzzzzz.

You can easily spend 20 words before saying anything at all. That is 10% of your entire submission gone.

Start with the interesting thing. If you deployed something across 500 locations, say that. If it reduced costs by 27%, say that. If the project failed the first time and the lesson challenges accepted wisdom, say that.

Don’t waste half the submission describing the company when there are other fields for the organisation and the speaker (and the content team can just Google you...)

Your 200 words need to sell the session.

Do not disguise a product pitch as thought leadership

GSMA has thousands of companies on the show floor whose job is to sell things.

It does not particularly need the conference programme to do the same job.

A useful test is whether somebody who will never buy your product could still learn something valuable from the proposed session.

If the answer is no, it probably needs another look.

If it still sounds like a sales deck, it probably is.

Make it an MWC27 idea

Do not dust off an existing event abstract, change the title and stick MWC27 at the top.

GSMA explicitly wants fresh, event-specific content.

A perfectly decent conference abstract is exactly what thousands of other people are submitting too.

Give the content team a reason to care about this one.

Why does this conversation belong in Barcelona in March 2027?

You can do all of this and still not get picked

There is no secret formula.

Ultimately, you can think you’ve done all the right things and still lose a game 7-1 in the pouring rain on Hackney Marshes (on your birthday).

A strong proposal can still lose out because GSMA already has enough content on the subject, another company has a stronger customer example, somebody else gives the programme a perspective it needs, or simply because another submission is better.

Playing the percentages is not about pretending you can guarantee the result, but it is about not giving away easy reasons to say no.

it’s a competitive field but the entry is free, so you may as well have a go.

Just make sure you give yourself the best chance when you do.