Confessions of a Marketing Rockstar

To me, Philipp was an excellent interview candidate for our Future of Events series because he is the organizer of the yearly OMR Festival, a physical mega event (52.000 Visitors, 600 Speakers and 400 Exhibitors) with cult status within the German marketing industry.

Unsurprisingly, the 2020 OMR Festival could not take place due to the pandemic.

During our fireside chat he revealed, the shock of having to cancel the event at short notice (Philipp even admitted: “I cried a little...”) and the hardest days in his professional career were followed by the transformation.

The magic word in this case is "unbundling" - Philipp and his team decided not to digitize the entire mammoth project and focused on specific elements instead. He ended up creating online master classes, a review platform, podcasts, etc.

After all of this hard work, he is proud that no one had to be laid off. 40-50 of his employees are usually busy working on the festival all year round. Instead, Philipp currently employs them in his vaccination center until things return to normal - chapeau!

His goal is to arrive on his pre-pandemic level within a year, but then the festival will be just an add-on in OMR’s portfolio.

He doesn’t think the festival will be happening this year. There simply isn’t enough planning security in his eyes and his partner trust his judgement. The next OMR Festival probably won’t be rocking Hamburg before 2022.

On a personal level, the last 12 months have made him stronger and more confident about his team and his own doubts.

In the future, Philipp sees a co-existence of physical and digital formats. In his opinion, the top 2-3 events per industry will surely have a come back, but it will be harder for smaller formats because the attitude towards business travel has changed permanently.

I asked him to share his best digital moment during the pandemic. He shared that it must have been his first weekend on Clubhouse. But the hype was followed by a quick drop in relevancy. Today, he sees the app as virtually meaningless in Germany.

His worst digital moment was when his platform was down for 15 minutes during one of his masterclasses. Alright, we’re all familiar with these situations.

In his opinion, a great killer feature for digital events would be really good matchmaking which is neither sales nor empty pickup lines.

My own take-away from our conversation:

Philipp is absolutely authentic, approachable and down to earth. And twenty minutes really isn’t enough time to really listen to this guy and his story.

Thank you for joining us and sharing your story and learnings, Philipp!