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This was now our second real stand (the first being last year’s 4m2 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona) and our first time in the context of online. The next one will be in Adtech, NY, November 3-6th 2008.

OMD was A LOT bigger, than I was expecting. It’s funny when suddenly all these digital companies meet, and everything which before seemed so virtual felt so real. There might to be a market around online marketing, after all. LOL

So, the stand…
This time, we (Richard Sirén from Pen&Hammer and myself) designed the stand using some interesting material: foam. Two types of Polyether foam actually, the white ones were made of mattress foam and the red ones of sponge foam.

We sketched and designed  four little people: man and woman hands down, and man and woman waving. These little foam people were ordered from a company who makes mattresses and sponges. “400 of these, please!”
Turned out quite voluminous! I was then supposed to take these with me from Helsinki to Düsseldorf. Now, that’s about 4 of the largest trash bags. I asked DHL and UPS for an offer and they gave me an estimate which was over 1000 euros! For 5kg!? They call it dimensional weight. Luckily, airberlin didn’t have anything like this. “It’s all about the kilos”, their customer service told me, “it can be 10 bags, as far as the total weight is below 20kg”.

In Düsseldorf, people seemed really friendly! At least, everybody was smiling at me as I was walking around with my luggage, weekend bag, 4 transparent plastic bags filled with little people and a backpack.

The stand was designed with the thought that it would be an eye catcher. I never thought that would still work with the stand packed in plastic bags!

Anyways, 1pm on Tuesday, the black foil was in place on the walls, so I could finally start gluing these little people with 3M’s flexible spray glue to the walls. Took around 10h.

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I am quite please with the result. We got excellent feedback and large interest at OMD and it even ended up being great material for us when presenting the company and what we do.

Today, we are very excited since we are launching our first competition: Xtract Scenario Competition.

If you could see the social connections between your website visitors and find out who are the most influential ones – how could you utilise the knowledge to your business benefit?

Submit a presentation describing how you would utilise insight about your most influential users and the way your user base is networked, for example to improve your online marketing and advertising campaigns.

This is one of a twin pair competition, the other one being a closed competition for certain art schools around the world (opening October 22nd, 2008). We hope that these competitions will give some insight for both the online and mobile communities into the art of social networks and advertising in real social networks.

Any one with good ideas are invited to participate to the scenario competition, as it aims at being a vast brainstorm of scenarios of how to utilise the real social network of web sites.

The first prize is the Wacom Cintiq 12WX, read more on the competition website.