David Politis

For about the 15-billionth time, Politis Communications took at least one of its clients to a ShowStoppers Media Reception at a major trade show. And once again the results were awesome!

This year, we had three clients at the Showstoppers-produced event — HandHeld Entertainment, HobbyTron.com and ifrogz – which was held for the second year in a row at the Wynn Resort & Casino. Very classy!

Showstoppers lined-up roughly 100 companies as co-sponsors of the event, which was crazy enough. But at last count, Showstoppers had more than 1,000 RSVPs from tech journalists and analysts prior to the event.

For its part, Showstoppers put on a fantabulous event. The food was wonderful and plentiful, there were plenty of watering holes placed throughout the ballroom, and they had even gone to the trouble to make arrangements to broadcast the NCAA D-I National Championship Football game between Ohio State and the University of Florida on screens hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the hall. A nice touch for college football fanatics like myself.

At the end of it all, each of our three clients made great contacts at the show, with several nice stories already published/broadcast.

At the end of the day, I will continue to A) recommend media receptions for clients as a very cost-effective and efficient way of meeting a lot of journalists and analysts at one time, and B) definitely recommend Showstoppers as my favorite media reception producers.

Good job, Showstoppers!

The people running CES (the Consumer Electronics Association) did something right in a BIG way this year.

I got to grab my “badge holder” at the airport. Very cool.

Rather than have to muck-around with determining where at the LVCC (Las Vegas Convention Center) I had to go to grab a badge holder (and you can’t get into CES without one), the CES people decided to make it easy on us pre-registered types and allow us to snag one at the airport. That was nice!

So I made my 1 p.m. flight on Delta (SLC to LAS) today.

Unfortunately, the fact that I was at the airport early didn’t help me any we had to wait for a flight attendant to arrive on an inbound flight before we could take off. Duh!

We ended up leaving almost 90 minutes behind time.

A word to the wise. If you ever book a flight a long time in advance, make sure you verify the departure time before arriving at the airport.

My reservations for traveling to Las Vegas from Salt Lake City said the departure time with Delta Airlines was at 8:20 a.m. However, the original reservations had been booked 4+ months in advance.

Had I checked with Delta in advance, I would learned that the departure time had been switched to 8:05 a.m. As it was, I missed making my flight by five minutes. AAARGHHH!

Unfortunately, every single SLC to LAS flight with both Delta and Southwest Airlines that day were not only full, but overbooked. My colleague made it out on the next flight; I did not, missing it by one person.

I finally decided to forego spending the day at the Salt Lake International Airport a la Tom Hanks’ character in The Terminal, and moved my reservation to the next day at 1 p.m., the soonest I was able to guarantee myself a seat.