Hacking a Conference: Web 2.0
This is a nice bit of guerilla marketing. API startup Mashery figured out how to take advantage of the open layout of the Palace Hotel and get the equivalent of a “sponsor room” without paying the sponsor rate. As soon as O’Reilly announced the dates and location for Web 2.0 Summit, the Mashery team booked a conference room from the hotel, smack in the middle of the show. They’ve spent their time serving up “15 gallons of free margaritas for anyone who wandered in.”
Very inexpensive, very smart, though it runs the risk of royally pissing off the conference organizers (CMP and O’Reilly) who have to balance out expectations of the other sponsors. That said, I hope CMP and O’Reilly take this with good graces and give a nod to the Mashery guys for doing some smart conference crashing.
Web 2.0 “is a great conference,” (Mashery investor Josh) Kopelman said. “This is not a dig at them at all. O’Reilly writes all about hacking things. We just figured we’d hack the conference.”
4 Comments
I actually laughed out loud at this post. I hope O’Reilly & the gang will look at the “hacking” from the funny perspective instead of the “OH we HATE you bastards” perspective.
Personally, it sounds to me like Mashery was just trying to have some fun and get some publicity, and all in all, it doesn’t seem like it hurt anyone.
Thanks for the nice writeup – you will be happy to know (as I was) that O’Reilly and CMP were both quite gracious. Tim stopped by the room a couple times (I gave him a margarita; not sure if he drank it) and was quite cool about it. And last night, a friend from CMP invited me up to an intimate VIP gathering in a suite upstairs, where I had a great talk with CMP conference director Jennifer Pahlka, who was very nice. I told her I’d buy her lunch in the next couple weeks, and she accepted. Couldn’t ask for a better reaction.
Fair play to them. O’Reilly may well have a legal letter waiting for them by the end of the show. Hopefully they don’t have any web 2.0 branding on any of their margarita stemware or they’ll get two letters from him!
Oren – great to hear things went so well with CMP and O’Reilly.