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NACA Report
(October 21, 2009)
The NACA conference can be summed up quite well with two words: "cold" and "wet." It rained all weekend. Actually, that's not true. It started out as snow as I left my house in New Jersey and headed for Amish country in Pennsylvania.
The event itself wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was expecting to be manning my booth the entire weekend, so Thursday night I got set up and started passing out my sampler DVD to the unsuspecting students, and then an hour and a half later they announced that CAMP was closed. CAMP is their cute term for the trade show floor - The College Activities Marketplace. They kicked out all the students so they could go watch the next round of showcases and the place emptied out like a bunch of little toys getting sucked down a drain. So I was free for a few hours until CAMP opened up again later that night. And that's pretty much how it went all weekend.
In my booth I had my rig set up showing the video of the show I taped in New York City and absolutely nobody watched it. Nobody. Not a single person gave it more than just a passing glance. I'm so glad I spent the past few weeks killing myself getting that thing edited. I could have shown episodes of Danger Mouse and gotten a better response. However, I also had a laptop set up with my DVD in it and once I got people talking I could usually get them to put on the headphones and watch a minute or two of my video. I was told that candy is "always popular" for getting people into the booth. I have proven them wrong. I bought a huge bag of Hershey Miniatures and Kisses and set them out and I was the one who ended up eating most of them. I printed up post cards with a photo and bio on one side and my contact info on the back, sort of like an oversize business card. That worked out pretty well, but I printed up too many of them. I also made up too many DVDs, so I'll be giving the extras to subscribers.
So now I need to follow up with the schools who showed interest in bringing me to campus. NACA provided me with an Excel spreadsheet of all the college kids who were there so that will make it easy for me. Now if I could just get all this real work and freelance work out of the way maybe I'll actually have some time to actually contact these people. In the mean time life goes on. And these non-music-related projects I'm involved in go on and on and on and on.
This is an abbreviated report. The full report will be available in the Fall 09 newsletter for subscribers.
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