About IBC 2025

IBC was an absolute blast.

I got the opportunity to travel to Amsterdam for this event and staff our booth. First, I have to say I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the event.

One thing that stood out was that IBC wasn’t in simply one or two massive halls like most other conferences and trade shows. Nope, IBC was in 14 different halls! But don’t be fooled, many of them were just as big as anything in Las Vegas.

When the team and I ventured out to Amsterdam, we weren’t quite sure what to expect. None of us had worked a trade show booth in Europe before, so we didn’t know if or what the differences would be. Honestly, we were shooting blind for a lot of it, hoping that the European market wasn’t too different from the US events we’d done before.

What We Tried

I will tell you that the Europeans were shocked by our raffle giveaway. Seems like table stakes for a booth in the US, but our booth visitors’ jaws dropped when they discovered we were giving away huge LEGO sets for free. Every day.

To drive more traffic to our booth, we tested a few new things.

First, we delivered a speaking session at the stage right next to our booth. The audience was packed and I think our message really hit. The talk was short and sweet, just about 15 minutes long, but really told the story of why the digital media supply chain is so broken – and how AI can fix it.

Another thing we tested was a live raffle. In previous events, we had folks enter the raffle by scanning their badge, then we’d mail the winner their prize. Well, we wanted to do something this time around that really brought the action right into the booth.

So, we hosted a live raffle every afternoon – giving away a serious LEGO set every day. The caveat was that you had to be present to win. We told everyone to show up at 4pm or you can’t win. We wrote it on the back of every raffle ticket, so they wouldn’t forget.

Come 4pm, and we had massive crowds around our booth everyday. It was a huge attention grabber.

New Messaging and Positioning

This event was also unique for us at Files.com because it was the first time we brought our new messaging and positioning to a live audience.

Files.com isn’t simply another Managed File Transfer platform, it’s a secure File Orchestration Platform.

A new category that we felt wasn’t just unique but was necessary to communicate that Files.com does so much more than managed file transfer.

So, we test drove this new messaging in our conversations and people loved it.

They instantly got it. “File orchestration. Yup, that’s what I need.”

Transferring files is still a core part of the problem we solve, but with orchestration, users can automate file movement, permissions, data governance, collaborate with each other in real-time and so much more, all while staying secure.

In a world like media & broadcast, where the gorgeous hardware gets much of the attention, everyone still has files they need to send or receive. We had enlightening conversations, gave away some LEGO sets (and tons of canvas tote bags), and got to know the media & broadcast industry so much better.

Who Was at IBC

We met folks from regional TV broadcast companies, podcasting agencies, and even some of our current customers that just happen to be attending.

One of the challenges we heard about was a film producer that needed to share video stills with her team so they could recreate the scene during reshoots, as accurately as possible. But she also didn’t want those stills getting out to just anyone – she wanted to make sure the share link was secure and had a short expiration, so the possibility of a leak was mitigated as much as possible.

All in all, we loved the experience – complete with amazing weather, beautiful cityscapes, and delicious stroopwafels!

Signing off,

Tom Snyder

Marketing Director