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The Event That Built a Marketing Program
Sonia AdvaniAugust 13, 2026
Senior Product Marketing Strategiest in Professional Services
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- Akamai was an established enterprise infrastructure company whose products depended on developers, but it lacked a formal developer marketing program, scaled community, and strong visibility with developers.
- I had to launch Akamai’s first modern developer event presence at OSCON in under 30 days without a booth, collateral, swag, event template, or established developer marketing function.
- I designed the booth as a repeatable developer ecosystem touchpoint with inviting community and education zones, practical amenities, signup paths, and messaging shaped by direct input from evangelists, sales, and developers.
- The execution relied on booth strategy and layout, direct event negotiation, creative and copy collaboration, vendor and swag coordination, iPad-based community signup, and templated experience design.
- The booth exceeded its target by roughly 800% while coming in 20% under budget, drove sustained engagement and signups, increased executive support and funding, and became the foundation for globally scalable events, nearly 3x developer attendance at Akamai Edge, and a broader content roadmap.
The context
Akamai was an established enterprise infrastructure company whose SaaS products were evaluated, championed, and used daily by developers. Developers were critical decision-makers. Yet Akamai had no formal developer marketing motion, no scaled developer community, and limited visibility with developers relative to its competitors.
I was recruited from Salesforce specifically to build and grow that program from the ground up. OSCON, O'Reilly's open source conference, became the first real proving ground: Akamai's debut modern developer event presence, and the precedent that would shape every developer event that followed.
The challenge
Launch Akamai's first modern developer event presence in under 30 days.
At the starting line there was no booth, no collateral, no swag, no event template, and a developer marketing function still being defined in real time. The event had to deliver on four fronts simultaneously:
- Engagement that went deeper than badge scans
- Community signups from both current and prospective developers
- Actionable feedback for evangelists, sales, and product
- A repeatable model that could scale to global conferences
There was no internal baseline to work from, so success criteria had to be estimated from historical data. And the audience itself was the hardest part of the equation: developers have finely tuned instincts for detecting when they are being marketed to, and they leave.
The approach
The strategic insight drove everything: developers don't want to be marketed to. They want to learn, connect, and belong.
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