WebIT Expo – The Bulgarian Adtech

Yesterday, I took time off from my studies at IE and ventured on a Sofia trip to visit the Webit Expo. It was an event that singed up a long time ago and has been expecting pretty much as I was expecting my Adtech London ’09.

To give you a bit of pre-event history, I must say that WebIT Expo is the first showroom for e-Business and e-Marketing event in Bulgaria of that scale. And a truly remarkable effort on eAcademy‘s part. The PR and advertising effort were enormous. One had to live really on another planet not to notice all the posters, printed media advertising, SMO, SEM or SEO initiatives taken. It said that lecturers from Google, MMA, The Guardian, Ciao!,eBay, PayPal, Mindshare, eAcademy and others will be present. And they really were. A bit pricey, though… 350 EUR early bird cost and 525 EUR for the once that took their time to buy the panel package. I decided to visit only the showroom and not purchase a seat in the lectures.

To my surprise, when I arrived, I found a showroom space literally less than my grand mother’s yard and not more than 10 exhibitors – a couple of companies offering hosting and domain names, few media companies and some web designing firms. This was all… And unfortunately, this illustrates perfectly the Bulgarian reality – it is definitely not digital. Even the guys presenting their services did not know how to sell them exactly. I went there to look for a web developer for one of my projects and had clear questions in my mind. Instead, I was offered blah-blah and a look at a catwalk of some models dressed in the company logo outfits. Unprofessional, tacky and not even oriental…

Raising awareness is great, but I wish next year eAcademy hits harder on the showroom space sales and offers more for those who do not need to listen to how Google Adwords work or how important(popular) is SMO these days.

Kudos on the initiative, though!

Image source: WebIT