Capt. Midnight: Quiet on the Western Front

From: Ramon Chen
Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2001 11:02 PM
To: *All MetaTV
Subject: Capt. Midnight: Quiet on the Western Front

CHECK OUT THE LATEST WCS PHOTOS AT \\Magellan\Public\Marketing\WCS2001
 
Hello everyone from (brrr) chilly Anaheim where the Western show was back to it’s regular home (last year it was at the L.A Convention center).
As you know we made the decision in October to bow out of our own booth gracefully and I’m delighted to report that we made the right call.
The exhibits floor was at least half the size of last year with most of the major “showboat” programmer booths not participating. Gone were the bags full of giveaways and goodies that people were lugging around last year … and in fact as a sign of the times (if not another kind of sign), one of few giveaways involved the EWTN (Catholic Channel) giving away stickers that said “Please pray for EWTN to be carried on your cable network”.
In terms of attendence numbers, last year’s show attracted about 33,000 folks and this year only 17,000 or so showed, about a 48% drop. So actually, given all this and the low traffic at the show, MetaTV received the continuous validation from other vendors and atttendees that dropped by our partner pods that we did the “wise” thing by changing our exhibiting strategy. In fact, we were told privately by some of the booth vendors that they wished that they had made the same call.
 
Armed with our fabulous suite at the Mariott which Diane, Craig and Jeff set up. We had a wonderful meeting space with all of our demos, which everyone back home worked so hard to produce (thank you to everyone in Engineering for all your help once again – more specifics will be detailed in a following e-mail) will be, showcased in a very comfortable MetaTV branded setting. The “suite” team put together all of the comforts of home in a true P2P manner, going out and shopping for food and drink at the local supermarket to cater for the daily visitors and having all of the incredible demos set up in a very high tech, impressive viewing area where the meetings/demos could take place in a relaxed atmosphere. An initial pulse check of meetings that took place indicate much success, interest and very satisfied visitors. Big thanks to Diane for running the suite so efficiently.
 
One interesting meeting of note involved a large Korean contingent for which Paul Lee (who speaks the lingo) together with Kyo organized a tour of the MetaTV partner pods to see our offerings. It was quite a sight to see Jim Gold demonstrating Portal Designer at the Microsoft Booth, with each description/action translated into Korean by Paul to the visiting dignitarys (who were in fact Liberate distributors!). Talk about MetaTV adapting the partner pods to our leverage in a “multi-platform” way.
 
To recap, although we didn’t have our own booth, we did have a hotel suite for meetings and we also showcased our demos at Motorola, Microsoft, Liberate and OpenTV. We also took advantage of the Microsoft Theater to do 6 presentations to audiences on their big screen, being one of only 3 partners to be given a chance to do so.
If you were with MetaTV last year or read the Capt. Midnights in the archives in Outlook folders *marketing/*Capt. Midnights, you’ll see a stark contrast of activities and excitement levels this time round. However, a tremendously gratifying thing for us as a company is to see how far we’ve come in terms of industry brand and recognition at this show. Jeff (stationed at OpenTV), Sarah (at Motorola), Jim (at Microsoft) with David De and Ruth floating/rotating in relief continued to hear people say words like “wow you guys are everywhere”, “oh MetaTV, of course I know who you are and what you do”, “everyone knows MetaTV”.
In fact, another amusing anecdote involved Jeff Kirsopp at the OpenTV booth where some attendees came by and chatted to him (Thinking he worked for OpenTV – because he happened to be wearing an OpenTV labeled badge at the time) and when asked what they saw at the show that really impressed them said “Well … that MetaTV has some really great stuff”! Gotta love the endorsements from random attendees.
 
On the publications side, although we didn’t have any press releases to issue this time around, we were featured with no less than 6 mentions in a new magazine called Interactive Quarterly (dedicated to interactive TV). Garnishing significant coverage on a variety of news items. Unfortunately, we didn’t win at the Bandies for our Worldspan app but we were very proud to have been nominated and Andrew Lev (as Judge), John Esrey and Sarah represented us to check out the awards ceremony.
 
All in all, we continued to make great strides in our mind share and worked hard with partner and prospect meetings to drive CAS (customer acquisition and satisfaction) goals. We P2Ped it all the way with partner booths, low cost accommodations, car pooling down in some cases rather than flying as well as working the vendors and partners for all of the free stuff that we could (Jeff did a great job, negotiating on the floor for premium time slots and positioning in all of the partner booths – we were full time at OpenTV (while some other partners, like Respond had to rotate out each half day).
 
With another half day to go we can officially classify this Western as yet another successful MetaTV event in which we made the most of every opportuntity we had. The atmosphere was definitely lower key given all the circumstances and the answer to “now that you’re done with Western, where u gonna go?” was definitely NOT “Disneyland!”, but rather … back home to Mill Valley, CA where we can proudly tell everyone at home base “we looked good, because you made us look good.”
 
Thanks again for all your efforts and your continued support, see u back home on Monday!
 
The Capt.

Leave a Reply