A Week in Amsterdam

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to travel and work in Europe for a short, one-week run-in in Amsterdam. I've had a week or so back to reflect on my time and I've decided to share my experience in the form of a blog post. Enjoy!

I'll start out with the iconic I amsterdam  letters. This was one of the first things we saw the morning we landed in the Netherlands and was definitely the moment that it hit me, we were in Amsterdam! I say "we" because I was one of 15 students from the UNC School of Journalism to travel to Amsterdam with one of our professors, as part of an internship program.

Here is all 15 of us posing around the letters. As soon as we landed in Amsterdam, however, we were no longer called interns. Instead, we identified as reporters for our professor Gary's company: [rAVe Publications]. rAVe is an all digital publications company that covers everything to do with the audiovisual(AV) technology industry. And for a little under a week Amsterdam was housing the largest AV trade show in the world: Integrated Systems Europe.

This is a picture of the front of the convention center, referred to by all taxi drivers as: "the rai." Simply put, this convention center housed 12 hallways that could each multiple football fields inside of them. It was massive. This year's audience was at an all time high: 51,003 attendees.

 

This was the calm before the storm. One highlight of the trip was the daily breakfast! Here is our first team breakfast where we discussed the week's plan and prepared for our first AV trade show. Notice our uniform for this first day consisted of long sleeve t-shirts and pullover sweaters. 

After a quick setup of our booth, it was practice time. We had 15 journalism students reporters about to be thrown in to a massive trade show with thousands of products that most of us had little experience talking about before. The picture above is Russ and Molly practicing "product videos" with a cow sculpture. As reporters, our job was to visit every single booth on the show floor and shoot as many product videos as each company was willing to do. These were short, roughly one minute videos of someone from the company describing the product and giving an elevator pitch, in a sense, that we then return to them for free publicity. Our staff uploaded videos every night before they left the convention center, providing free marketing videos to every company at the show within 24 hours.

 

Once the show started, we worked long hours roaming the show floor, on our feet all day. It was hard work, but so fun. We had a quota of 50 videos to shoot every day of the show and for me this gave me a challenge to work towards. I thrive under competition so knowing that there was a goal to meet and that it wouldn't be easy to reach it was energizing to me.

 

Digital Signage. 4K. LED. HDTV. These are just a few of the buzz words we heard countless times at the trade show. I shot over 150 videos myself of various products such as the one shown above. After reporting at Integrated Systems Europe for a week I definitely left feeling more in the loop with the AV industry talk and blown away by the products and technology showcased.

 

I wanted to wrap this post up with a picture of some of us on our day off exploring the local market. For lunch we had felafel from a Dutch street vendor. This was probably my favorite meal in Amsterdam! I sit here a couple of weeks later counting down the days until I can return to that country. The energy in Amsterdam was exhilarating and I know that there's so much more to explore. Until next time, proost!