In May 2022, the OMR Festival took place in Hamburg’s exhibition halls after a two-year break, and ZUCKER.Berlin colleague Laura had the pleasure of being there – along with around 70,000 other guests from the marketing and media industry. It was big. It was colorful. It was loud. It was OVERWHELMING. With a focus on online marketing, digitalization and technologies, over 800 international speakers took to 10 different stages. Over 500 exhibitors found a place in the huge expo halls – small and large companies, agencies, start-ups and other visionaries. In addition, festival ticket holders could apply for master classes, guided tours and many more side events – not to mention the food area. Quite a lot of offers, quite a lot of input and quite a lot of impressions. Laura has sorted her experiences for you and would like to share her personal highlights.
As a holder of one of the limited festival tickets – in contrast to the Expo tickets – she was lucky enough to be able to attend all the performances, concerts and master classes. In addition to well-known representatives of the media, influencer and PR industry, she has also seen Ashton Kutcher live on stage. She missed the performances and concerts of Quentin Tarantino and Zoe Wees – that’s life. Here are Laura’s festival impressions and learnings:
First things first
Be realistic: It is IMPOSSIBLE to take in all the exciting speakers and performances in two days. Be it for a) reasons of logistics – yes, at some point even the big exhibition halls are full and there is an admission stop or b) reasons of time – keep in mind: it can take 20 to 30 minutes to walk from one hall to the other. In addition, there are overlaps with other events – Laura’s priority was everything that had to do with PR, journalism and influence relations. Her tips for the next time: think about who or what you want to see at OMR at least a day in advance, and also plan enough breaks between events. A schedule that doesn’t allow for five-minute breaks between two presentations is simply utopian and unrealistic, if only because the walk from stage to stage, as mentioned, usually takes much longer than five minutes.
With her schedule and priorities in mind, Laura actually saw many of the speakers she really wanted to hear on stage and learned many new things, gathered great impressions and experienced the OMR Festival Visit 2022 as a full success. Her personal highlight was attending a “PR 101” masterclass with t3n digital pioneers and meeting and networking with old acquaintances who were also guests at the two-day trade show.
Expo area aka networking events
What makes a trade fair a trade fair? The exhibitors! At OMR 2022, the expo area was divided into a hall with “smaller” exhibitors and another hall with premium exhibitors. The premium exhibitors included in particular large companies such as About You, Ströer, XING or ZUCKER.Kunde Amazon. Networking with food and drinks took place at the respective booths and the popular Expo parties started at the end of the day.
What’s more, Laura found it exciting that Art NFTs, or crypto art, also made it into the Premium Expo. Because since the collaboration with the Berlin team of GO! ZUCKER. has also been involved with NFT and blockchain business in connection with the urban street art scene. So it’s interesting to see that Art NFTs have now also arrived at OMR. We remain curious to see what development and innovation is coming in the next few months.
In the “normal” Expo area, Laura was primarily interested in everything related to influencer relations and influencer marketing – an important part of our daily business, e.g. in the Foot Locker team or at Amazon Publishing. Here, she also had an appointment with the Labs Management team to talk about future collaborations, the current portfolio and generally possibilities for cooperation. So great to have finally met the people we usually only communicate with via email in real life!
Please welcome…
The speaker appearances were the heart of the OMR Festival. More than 800 bright minds shared their knowledge, their experiences and their visions on the topics of media, marketing and technology. Well, more or less at least: Some prefer to talk about themselves and their secret to success (also exciting, no question, but less value for the audience), others give concrete tips for implementation. With Laura’s focus on PR and influencers, it was relatively easy to filter through the huge range of topics. Among her highlights were Ann-Katrin Schmitz from “Baby Got Business” on co-creation with influencers and shitstorm management, Rezo on manipulation on social media aka the botting phenomenon and how content creators falsify their KPIs, as well as a dialogue between representatives of Tiktok and Hugo Boss on the use of the social media platform as an entertainment channel and new Netflix instead of an Instagram alternative. She also found the discussion between Louisa Dellert, Sophia Thiel and Diana Thyselius on the concept of purpose-driven influencer marketing exciting. Gabor Steingart, who presented his media ship The Pioneer as a kind of modern publishing house on the road – er, on the water – also gave her food for thought. Laura also found the presentations on the so-called 50/50 Stage, which gave women and feminist topics in particular a platform, exciting. The topics ranged from social coffee business to a plea for more women in politics.
PR 101: How to hack a journalist’s brain
The absolute highlight for Laura was her participation in the masterclass “PR 101: How to hack a journalist’s brain” by the t3n digital pionieers editorial team consisting of editor-in-chief Holger Schellkopf and start-up expert Insa Schniedermeier. Together, they talked about the cooperation with PR agencies and gave the participants 10 Dos and DONTs for a successful cooperation between PR professionals and journalists. Without wanting to brag or anything: Most of the tips were nothing new for us 😉 . Nevertheless, a nice confirmation that we understand our job. Nevertheless, there were of course also some aspects that we perhaps hadn’t really thought about before. For example, the idea of contacting journalists via LinkedIn rather than by e-mail in order to pitch topics. Have you done this before? According to Holger Schellkopf and Insa Schniedermeier, this is now the preferred communication channel for many colleagues.
Let’s summarize: OMR 2022 was CRAZY. The information offered was overwhelming, partly overstraining, but nevertheless very instructive and interesting. Our colleague Laura is happy to have been there.
A post by Laura Dörling