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Oracle OpenWorld 2007: More than Just Pens and Squishy Toys
By Eric Gross | December 13, 2007
As a marketer, I am fully aware of the amount of time, organization, resources, and hard work required to pull off a successful event. A few weeks ago I attended my first Oracle OpenWorld, the mother of all tech events.
I have been to large trade shows before, but Oracle OpenWorld is in another league. The streets of San Francisco shut down around the Moscone Center and red Oracle banners 
and billboard ads were plastered all around the city. Everywhere you went there were people with little Oracle name tag lanyards around their necks toting laptops or using their BlackBerrys. Virtually every hotel in the city had a dedicated Moscone Center shuttle bus, which was extremely impressive, especially since it ran about every 15 minutes! So, to my point, yes, this was something else.
I arrived in San Francisco a few days before the show started and was able to see the conference hall transform overnight - literally. As an exhibitor, the workload is spread out over several weeks and months prior, so it doesn’t seem too overwhelming - at least until you arrive on-site. But the transformation that takes place inside the exhibit hall over a span of 2-3 days is incredible. I was talking to the union labor workers and some of them worked from 6 AM until midnight! And this is labor-intensive work here: driving forklifts, hanging signs from the rafters, building booths. Whenever you see these kinds of events from start to finish, it gives you a whole new appreciation and perspective on the work required to pull it off vs. if you had arrived once everything was set up and pretty, having no idea what it took to get it all done. This show is a lot more than just the giveaways of pens and squishy toys.
Though by far, I think the person who worked the hardest was the technicolor contortionist 
in our neighbor’s booth. Just watching him fit his body through tennis rackets and stuff himself into a box all day long is tiring! I do wonder about the ROI for these kinds of marketing gimmicks. We are “out-of-the-box automation”, perhaps for our next trade show, we will have a contortionist pop in and out of a box all day too!
Topics: Clarity, Database Automation, Marketing, Oracle, Trade Shows
May 20th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
thank you