One of the most watched videos of last year’s NEXT was the talk by Florian Heinemann, CEO of Rocket Internet. More than 12,500 people saw his thoughts on successful marketing after the conference.

Under the title “Towards a Better Understanding of Marketing Performance Across Multiple Channels“ he talked about achieving better comprehension of the customer’s journey and the different customer quality that some companies in the e-commerce business tend to neglect. Also some strategies of Zalando, one of Rocket Internet’s biggest projects, were mentioned.

Among the people who watched Heinemann’s talk were probably also some prominent members of the Otto Group, as Jochen Krisch on excitingcommerce conjectured on Wednesday. That might have been the crucial moment when the Otto management realised that the Rocket project Zalando is more than a short term marketing phenomenon but more a serious competitor in the online retail sector.

And so they probably decided to start a powerful counteroffensive. At that point it might have been fortune or calculation that some former Rocket Internet members left the company and started an own project called “The Oryx Project” that seems to be similar to the business model of Rocket Internet. There was not much that was published about that project besides the names of the founders. But now it’s clear that the potent investor Uwe Horstmann, Thies Sander and Christian Weiss are telling about on their website is the Otto Group itself.

Whether Florian Heinemann’s talk in fact led to these incidents is not proved – and is largely conjecture – but it’s worthwhile to watch his marketing insights again in our video section.