A great stage for promotional items

At the OMR festival, promotional product companies, PSI and media partners will be giving the promotional product a great and, in the truest sense of the word, sensual stage. We talked to PSI Director Petra Lassahn about the unique industry initiative ‘The Hapticologist’:

At the OMR Festival, the industry will be giving promotional products an exclusive stage. What prompted PSI to actively support this initiative?

The OMR Festival is one of the largest events in Europe’s online marketing and digital industry – a high-profile platform, in other words, for positioning promotional products as an important pillar in the marketing mix. As a network for around 5,000 companies in the promotional products industry, PSI simply has to support this! After all, our ‘mission’ has been to promote the promotional product and to support the industry for over six decades. Our presence at the OMR Festival is a new and important step that complements our other projects in a targeted manner: the PSI Academy and the PSI Academy Awards also help to raise awareness among marketers of the promotional product as a high-performance marketing tool – including in terms of sustainability.

A total of 13 promotional products companies and partners represent the industry at ‘The Hapticologist’ bar. With you at the helm of the renowned Bar Convent Berlin, this unique bar concept is in good hands. How did the bar idea come about and what is the idea behind it?

The idea was born last year in Hong Kong, when we stopped by with dealers and manufacturers at a bar recommended by bar professionals from Bar Convent Berlin. A bar is a place for good drinks, but first and foremost for communication – an ideal environment for marketing professionals to meet over a drink and discuss marketing strategies and promotional items. This idea was the basis of our concept, which we then further developed with our partners. The claim ‘The Center of Seven Senses’ clearly states what is important to us: the multisensory dimension in marketing is crucial to making brands tangible and creating memorable experiences.

What expectations and goals do you associate with the OMR festival?

Promotional items have been shown to have great potential as effective marketing tools. Now it is time to creatively present their possibilities in a marketing-relevant context. I could well imagine that the industry’s presence at this prominent, future-oriented business event will have a signalling effect: on the one hand, haptic advertising will be seen as an indispensable component in marketing that can be experienced with all the senses and thus in a completely different light than before. In addition, the presence in Hamburg can be an incentive for the industry to go public more strongly and to seek communication with potential target groups. We see good chances that the OMR festival can become a contact forum and business booster for the industry, which can count on the support of the PSI as its traditional home base. We at PSI and all our partners are looking forward to welcoming interested industry representatives who want to get to know the online marketing industry and visit us at ‘The Hapticologist’ bar. This will help us to achieve our common goal of raising marketeers’ awareness of promotional products.

More about the initiative at: www.thehap.bar