Bruno Lowagie's Online Gazette

Last week, I posted the following Tweet on my Twitter account:

"The iText generated #devoxx Conference Guide is a powerful example making my elevator pitch a success. Me happy!"

This reminded me of a ReTweet by Clo Willaerts:

"Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it."

This tweet referred to the article entitled The future of Advertising. Today, I finally took the time to read the article.

"The opportunity for marketers is that instead of having to pay for their message to run somewhere, they can "earn" media for free, via consumers spreading YouTube clips, Groupons, and tweets as if they were trying to saturate their networks with photos of their newborn."

This makes business much more honest: in the past only huge corporations were able to spread their message because they had the money to do so. I've been able to make iText a success without paying for any advertising ever. Sure, I've spent plenty of time on marketing, and time is money. in a way, writing a book is also great marketing, but that's a totally different kind of investment because it's merit based. If I'd written a useless book, nobody would talk about it.

"The days of lathering on a brand message that a product may not live up to are long gone."

I think that iText did well at Devoxx, I personally think my week was a success, but it will be even a bigger success if I now take the time to digest everything I talked about with different companies and developers. I need to do something with the knowledge and insights I've gained.