Internet World Exhibition

It's had no coverage in the printing trade press, very few people from the printing industry even know it's on and nobody that deals with printing technology is talking about it in the blogosphere. What is it? Internet World, the largest exhibition of internet stuff in Europe. Ever! It's on now at Earls Court in London.
To give you an idea of scale, there are more than 200 seminars across 6 theatres, split into specific areas: eCommerce Theatre, Email, Mobile Marketing & Analytics Theatre, Enterprise2.0 & Content Management Theatre, Connectivity and Hosting Theatre, Mobile, Online Advertising, Affilite & SEO Theatre and the Web2.0, Social Networking, Usability & Design Theatre.
There are over 320 suppliers exhibiting and there are more than 20 keynote presentations from the top marketers of companies such as:
Virgin, John Lewis, Porsche, Monster, B&Q, Barclays, HMV, Mars, Disney, Ogilvy, Hilton, LoveFilm and more.
There are also special networking sessions, an Agency day, roundtable discussions and, of course, lots of twittering and facebooking going on.

Marketers are going there to learn about digital marketing. I have seen no evidence of the word 'print' anywhere. There are no representatives of any of the printing industry bodies, either UK or European, on any booth or presenting any seminars. There is no evidence of any of the 'Cross Media' companies such as MindFire, EasyPurls, XMPie, Online Print Solutions or Pageflex to put across the relevance of print in the digital mix. There are no representatives from the world of Web-to-Print (except perhaps me and a handful of other visitors). There are no printers (sorry, that should be 'Marketing Services Providers').

If, as an industry, we are going to rise to the challenge of changing our business models, it should start with learning where the threats and opportunities lie. We should start banging the drum about the effectiveness of targeted print at events like this, instead of complaining about attendance levels at Print shows.

I'll be here for two days so I'll blog some more about what I see and hear.

www.w2p.co.uk