…Or so it was for Tuesday and Wednesday (and definitely Thursday for Queen’s Day) of last week when around 835 registered delegates flocked in for the first ever European affiliate marketing event at the RAI in Amsterdam, branded in NL orange.

You’d think the flagging economy would have deterred the numbers but my only set back was BA, cancelling my flight, no worries though, I was soon re-routed onto KLM and landed safely with NMA Ad Director (and old colleague of mine) Bal Bhogal into Shipol Airport. Both of us arrived at the expo in the late afternoon of day one and managed to get settled into the networking experience. A couple of hours later and in the less formal surroundings of Amsterdam’s biggest club the “networking” really got going. Remembering that I had a big day ahead of me I managed somehow to find my hotel around 1am.

Thanks to my sensible decisions the previous night, I managed not to miss my chance to participate in a heated panel session with Matt Bailey (I-level) Helen Southgate (DGM), Pete Wilson (Platform A) on “Standardization, Self Governance and Self Regulation As An industry – Can This Become A Reality?” Our presentation was quick and to the point but the meat of the session was the Q&A which lasted a good 45 minutes. I did notice that there were very little questions from European markets, a clear indicator to me that the UK is more mature than the other markets in this area.

My favorite sessions and also very popular amongst attendees were Judith Lewis (I-level) International SEO’s session and Managing Cashback and Reward Sites Effectively.

The challenge of running an event abroad must be enormous, so hats off to Matt and the Existem team who managed to pull off a fantastic event – excellent attention to detail, great branding (the orange though is still flashing in my eyes like a Woodstock hangover), original conference content, lively buzz amongst a balanced and varied audience enhanced by an endless booze supply at some top party venues during the networking nights.

Whoever had the genius idea of running the event the day before Queen’s Day deserves to be applauded and highly congratulated. The madness of Amsterdam’s biggest party day was the best send off anyone could ask for.

Webgains will definitely be involved in the next event, which is rumored to be in Germany. I’m not sure if there is room for improvement on this year’s event and but I will look forward to seeing what the Existem team will pull out of their hat in 2010.

Check out pics here a4uexpo Europe, Amsterdam 2009 - a set on Flickr