Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft Cape Town tech day 2007, held at the International convention centre.
The event was organised to get current IT professionals accustomed to Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, System Center 2007, Microsoft Forefront and many more new technologies and solutions.
Many conference rooms were hired out and great presentations were made all day, complete with the usual tea, coffee, biscuits and even a neat clip Microsoft pen and clipboard (one of my highlights).
One thing that caught my eye was something you don’t normally see every day, two young gorgeous lady’s in black cocktail dresses in the main conference room standing by a booth advertising a company called Chisa Technologies ( an IT Infrastructure provider) . The fact that there were two lovely lady’s was not a novelty, neither that across the room there were 5 X Box 360’s with working game demos, but what was, was that upon a closer look I noticed not one guy (and there must have been about 200) were being drawn to the Chisa booth, they were all glancing past and quickly heading towards the X Box 360’s !!!, if you don’t believe me please enlarge the above pics to see for yourself.
Maybe it was just poor luck, but having being in this industry for a while and knowing a bit about marketing I would say it was more a case of nice idea but wrong place.
I went and chatted to a jolly nice chap called Gus from Chisa and he said he just wanted to “add a bit of fun to the event”, good for Chisa I say, and as far as I know after a slow start he realised the way forward was to get the girls to go to the guys, this proved much better, however I wish I had managed to get a photo of some of the guys faces when they were suddenly confronted by a blond and brunette in a little black number, priceless !!!
All in all a fun day, and if you too are in South Africa and fancy going to one of these events its not too late. To register for the 13 March 2007 at the Durban ICC,PLEASE CLICK HERE. and for Johannesburg, 15 March at Vodaworld. PLEASE CLICK HERE, Maybe you too can get a chance to meet the Chisa girls 😉