On 13^th January 2016, our new Graduate Marketing Assistant, Joe Sanders, travelled to London to attend his first trade exhibition as an ITL employee. He has written a blog post about his experience at the show.

When I first started at ITL, it was mentioned to me that I would most likely be attending an industry tradeshow within the first few months of my career here. After exhibitions in Las Vegas, Sofia and Milan had been and gone, I was left wondering to which exotic location I would be dispatched and I was not left disappointed as it turned out I was going to… the UK. However, this was not just any event in the UK, I was to attend EAG 2016 - one of the UK’s largest gaming events, which is held annually at the London ExCel.

I travelled down from Manchester to London Euston early on Wednesday morning so that I could arrive at the show at a decent time. I did not take into account how poor my sense of direction would turn out to be in London. I’m not unfamiliar with London but I definitely couldn’t find a job as tour guide in the city. As I arrived at London Euston, I was met with the fact that the Euston Underground Station was closed for unknown reasons. This put a dent into my travel plans as I only knew one very specific route to get to the ExCel. I spent the next 15 minutes walking aimlessly around London and calling any friends that had any London knowledge, hoping to find an underground station that could take me where I wanted to go. Eventually I made it to the ExCel and met up with the other members of the ITL team.

Much of my first few hours at EAG was spent becoming acquainted with how ITL operated at an event. Our stand that had been built for the show was fantastic, it was very stylish and stood out from all of the other stands nearby. I didn’t anticipate how busy the show would be and although the ExCel is a large event space, there seemed to be people packed into every corner of it. All of our representatives at the ITL stand were speaking to potential customers all day, demonstrating how our products could be implemented in their businesses. I don’t want to sound like a corporate stooge but I was very impressed with ITL’s stand (shown below), it just looked different from everything else and immediately stuck out.

At first glance EAG seems like a sprawling arcade, with various games and attractions scattered across the event hall. In the name of professional research, I made sure I tested each game (to get to grips with the validation technology, of course). After I had finished the day’s serious tasks, I made a point to meet as many of the representatives from the various press publications that were present at the show. I had been communicating via email with a number of these journalists for the past few months so it was nice to finally put some faces to the names.

After a full day of walking around the exhibition hall and soaking in the atmosphere of my first tradeshow, I braved the labyrinth of underground, overground and DLR trains to return to Euston and then onward home to Manchester Piccadilly. Although it was a long day, I enjoyed the experience and hopefully I’ll be able to visit a few more events in the near future.