In our meet and greets and general travels around Europe we are picking up on a growing frustration (from the Digital world) with POPAI in a couple of countries.
POPAI Germany is getting the worst press and its reputation is seemingly pretty tarnished at the moment.
There are far too many anecdotal stories that we are hearing about the German organisation using its position for the benefit of one particular company, of asking for payment in return for product positioning – in seemingly (so-called) impartial / neutral industry reports for us to ignore.
We also chose to report what a bad job we think POPAI Germany [1] did with the conference side of DS Expo and a couple of the Dutch networks complained also about POPAI Netherlands…
We think that POPAI did an awful job in supporting this show. POPAI Netherlands didn’t even mention the event on their website, so (we are told) there were virtually no visitors from the Netherlands.
It’s really unfortunate how each POPAI region operates as a ‘franchise’ with very little joined up thinking or strategy – other than the US and UK, who seem to conference call regularly to align strategy, the others OBVIOUSLY do their own thing.
Time for the Germans perhaps to come clean and put their house in order before they lose all credibility or is too late?