Carlos Amaya
Internship 4900
September 29th, 2014
Tanya Goetz

IAB MIXX EXPO CONFERENCE 2014

Septermber 29th my class mates and myself took a trip to IAB Mix Expo Conference. The location of the place was 1605 Broadway on 49th Street. They chose a really nice hotel (the crown plaza) to hold their event. After receiving our guest passes we grabbed a bag full of goodies. These bags contained items pertaining to each of the companies that were at the Expo. Each one of these items was very unique and had a fun way of engaging the user. My favorite one is probably the book marks which I later talked to the company (weibo.com) and found some interesting information. The room of the Expo was very small, it was smaller than I expected. I was very intimidated because it was a one on one conversation you had with a representative from the company. What really calmed me down was the massage section they had (although I never really got to try it).

After getting over the fear I looked for weibo.com. I was under the impression they were some sort of printing company. I was very mistaken when I spoke to the representative. When I listened the audio I recorded I noticed the representative didn’t state his name. I gave my full name, paused, then moved on with my question. I asked “What is weibo all about?” The representative explained that it is similar to facebook and is the twitter that the Chinese are using. The reason being that Twitter is not working in China. At the end of the questioning the Weibo representative scanned my pass so they can be able to send me more information on weibo. I later did some research on weibo and found that started out in 2009. At the moment weibo is the biggest social media site in China, and is also known as a micro blogging platform. I found that you can have a premium account for 10 yuan, which is equivalent to $1.63 American dollars. This benefits of the premium account include: receiving items for games, restoring deleted posts, customization of your profile. I also found that weibo has many things that are censored, certain hashtags like “one night stand” and many others. Many of these things relating to morals and spirituality.

I went to many other booths after weibo, but did not obtain enough information or they just weren’t as interesting. I finally came to everyone’s favorite booth GumGum. This was because they had something that made them memorable and fun. They had a little booth where you can take your photograph, they also had different props such as mustaches. After you were done you could view the photograph on the ipad and email it to yourself or print it out to have a hard copy.

What GumGum does is make display ads, which are those little ads that pop up from the bottom. What makes GumGum different from other ad companies is that they make them engaging to the viewer (kinda like the photobooth). GumGum does this for many of their clients to help them reach their audiences. I tried finding them on lexis nexis, but the information on them is very limited. Most of what I found is already on their about part of their website.