Most of this week I spent in Dublin at the Web Summit, an event that brings together internet startups, web business pioneers, investors and media for a two days conference and lots of partying. The event has grown from 500 to 10’000 attendees in just four years.
Knowing very well from the Campaigning Summit Zurich what it means to organize such an event I cannot help but admire this “farmer’s boy” (as he is called in Business Plus magazine) named Paddy Cosgrave for bringing this all together. This year estimations started at around 3’000 attendees but the number of people buying tickets seemed not to stop until we were 10’000. It was a masterpiece in event organisation how Paddy’s team managed this.
You can download the Business Plus magazine article «Paddy’s Summit» here. It is about how Paddy grew the event so fast and really interesting to read, especially if you are into event management. If I got it right, then there is one brief sentence to explain his strategy: create extraordinary benefits and keep a few things exclusive, surrounded by some sort of mystery.
Apart from top speakers like Niklas Zennström, Gay Vaynerchuck, the Irish Prime Minister and Elon Musk there were really valuable workshops. I learned quite a couple of useful things.
There was also a huge exhibition of startups from around the globe. It left me with a feeling that we are currently inventing too much. I wondered “Who will need all this?”. Others felt the same. It made me rethink my statement on innovation in an earlier blog post. We may be inventing a lot but if it’s not getting used…
Anyway, it was amazing to see all these ideas that people have and how they are going to turn them into more or less successful companies. Out of 10’000 ideas only 1’000 result in the incorporation of a company, 50% of which will fail in the US and 62% will fail in Europe.
As busy as we all were during the day, listening to speeches, connecting to new and meeting old friends, everybody went out partying in the evening until late at night. One bar ran out of Guinness at around 22:00…
What I would love to discuss with Paddy is what happened on the second day. They announced a new name for the event. It is no longer called The Web Summit. They now call it The Summit. Like «the one and only summit». I can understand that because it has grown so huge it must feel like THE summit to the Irish. But there are many more summits taking place every year. For instance the Campaigning Summit Vienna (31st January 2014) and the Campaigning Summit Zurich (23rd May 2014). Don’t miss them if you are interested in campaigning and how to reach out to your audience in a way that they – your customers, your members, your target groups, your stakeholders – help you to achieve your goals.
Readers of my blog can now preorder a ticket with a 100.- CHF discount here: http://www.amiando.com/CampaigningSummitZurich2014
When you register use the action code blogpm124
The offer is limited to 3 tickets on a first come, first serve base. Payment will not be required before we announce the names of the speakers and even then you can still cancel your registration at no cost.
We don’t need 10’000 attendees at the Campaigning Summit Zurich. 300 at the next one would make us more than happy. We are now at 12 preregistrations. Not bad. It’s a good start.