The debacle that was the Online Marketing Show

· by · in design, glue, my press life. ·

I spoke at the Online Marketing Show at the Design Centre in Islington last week – and it was perhaps the most shambolic presentation I’ve ever did.

  • Firstly, though I arrived with an 1/2 hr to spare as requested for technical run-through, the session before me was running late. This meant that the speakers entered the room at the same time as the audience, and with no checks.
  • Secondly, two out of the four speakers were a no-show (Chris was getting married so thats a pretty good excuse but still…)
  • Thirdly, Flo (Heiss, from Dare) and I were met with a technician who’s exact words were “No one told ME that anyone needed a computer”. This for a talk about Best in Show – cutting edge online marketing. I wonder what he thought we were going to be up to? I had already been told there was no internet access (at an Online Marketing Show?!) and had spent hours compiling a presentation that would have taken 10 mins to put together if it could have run live.
  • Next, the machine he dredged up from under the stage didn’t read my memory stick, so I had to copy it to an audience-member’s machine and then to the said laptop.
  • Finally thinking that I could start unhindered, I clicked on my first link, to find that Windows Media Player had never been installed, and the PC was to old to play .movs, so I had to jump out of my presentation, install the software and play the MPG1 format vids I had brought as a backup.
  • So, there I was playing the videos, and then I came to the 2nd part of the presentation – only to find NO Flash Player installed, and no internet connection to get me some.
I ended up describing the pieces of work through the power of animated hand gestures and verbal diarrhoea…
Lucky Flo just had JPGs.

Happily for me, Flo found a review of the talk online which cheered me up a lot…

One response to “The debacle that was the Online Marketing Show”

  1. I don’t know how you managed to keep going. I think I would have died . . . . . literally . . . . . yep, I really would have. I hate public speaking even when everything goes right and there you were speaking as a leading expert in your field and everything that could have gone wrong, pretty well did . . . . . . and you pulled it off! That’s incredible. The review was great though. You must have been very convincing with your gesturing and diarrhoea!!!! No wonder, you’re such a genius.

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