BizDays: Bucharest

Posted Sunday, November 25, 2007 at 1:42pm in Blogging, Business, Media, PR General  | 

I’ve just returned home from a whirlwind two days in Bucharest, Romania, where I was speaking at the capital’s BizDays event at the city’s World Trade Center. BizDays is a five day conference which includes speakers from all areas of the business community discussing issues and developments affecting the business world. Day 5 was purely on marketing and advertising and yours truly ran a workshop titled ‘Web 2.0 and PR”.

No thanks to KLM Airways who almost made me miss the conference because of a flight delay. Fine, these things happen but when your staff don’t allow me to take my own luggage with my own possessions to the complementary hotel then there’s a problem. I couldn’t change clothes, brush my teeth, take my lenses out etc. So, purely for SEO purposes: KLM Airways suck and KLM Airways sucks because KLM Airways customer service is poor. Flying with KLM Airways is not recommended.

Anyway…

I arrived at the conference with about an hour to spare so unfortunately didn’t have time to see any of the other talks or workshops taking place that day. What struck me most about the Romanian media scene is that its representatives all seem so young. Well, either that or Romanians age **really** well. I’ve never been to a conference with so many young people in attendance which is great as the atmosphere was one of interest and intrigue. There’s a great excitement about the industry which is still in its relative infancy over there.

Full praise to the guys at BMG (the organisers of the event) who, rumour has it, rarely slept a wink all through the week of the event.

Once I was done, I checked into the hotel and a little later got picked up by my new pal, Mihnea Miculescu, a young hotshot account executive at McCann Erickson who knows far too much and will probably end up running the Romanian PR scene one day. From there we met up with his PR director colleague, Veronica, and her friend (whose name escapes me) and headed to a few bars and clubs in the city.

Tip: If you ever go out for a night out in Bucharest. I strongly recommend you go to this place: Bamboo Club. You’ll see why when you’re in there. You can thank me later.

The following day Mihnea, Veronica and I went to a restaurant slap bang in the middle of the city where the architecture of some of the buildings is mind blowing. As was the restaurant with its amazing wood finishes and huge ceilings. If this restaurant was in London I’d expect to spend a week’s wages on my dish but, here, it cost less than a Strada and a thousand times classier.

We chatted about the Romanian PR and social media scene and the problems they were facing in the battle against advertising and the educating of clients about online communication. Pretty similar to the UK and elsewhere actually.

Pic by catb

We then drove around the city and saw the world’s second largest building, the Palace of Parliament, and the Arcul de Triumf, a replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, until I reluctantly had to head to the airport.

All in all, a fantastic experience and one which I hope to re-live again with a little more time and a suitcase filled with spare clothes (I travelled light). Experiencing Bucharest has made me want to ‘do a Michael Palin‘ and see the surrounding countries of my Eastern European cousins. More places added to the ‘places to visit list’ it seems.

Here’s my presentation if anyone wants to view it. Thanks to Youngie and Amelia for sending me some ammunition for the deck. Thanks to Constantin also for correcting my currency exchange minor slip. Bloomberg needs to seriously update its currency convertor!

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