I only had one day at IFT13. When you only spend one day, recapping a 4 day event can be dangerous. But, with a sample size of 25%, here goes.
Overall conference rating (from attendee point of view): A-
Some observations:
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The people at IFT are real pros. I’m not a fan of McCormick Place but things seemed to be running very smoothly. Nice job IFT!
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The people that attend IFT are brainiacs. Where else could you expect to see a tweet like this:
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Lots of ways to tackle a show of this size but this was my favorite approach:
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Big companies had their usual massive exhibits that screamed “Don’t come in here unless you’re a player.”
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Smaller businesses were very welcoming, enthusiastic, and interesting. Enjoyed speaking with several of them. By the way, how would you make color-coded cleaning supplies interesting?
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Good talk about real innovation (innovation noun \ˌi-nə-ˈvā-shən\1 : an idea commercialized):
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And good data about consumers:
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Many businesses need help with differentiation and positioning. Talk to me. Talk to @MarketPlaceSTL. Talk to somebody. You look like a commodity. Especially, China. China doesn’t know what marketing is. They had a very large presence but with their usual boring, generic, sterile exhibits all lined up in the most uninteresting way. Most attendants sleeping or wanting to.
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Fun to see my alma mater. Nice discussion about IP. Made me wonder that as learning becomes more and more a commodity for Universities, will they lean even more heavily on IP for potential revenue streams? Besides making IP attorneys rich, what affect will that have on the relationship between academia and business? Who owns what? And as we discussed, when it gets locked up with attorneys, might as well check back in a decade. Glad UNL seems to know what they’re doing and how to partner with business…
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Most exhibitors and attendees were social media illiterate. Perfect opportunity to make social media pay off but it wasn’t happening much. I made some great new Twitter friends though!
