“There was no plan,” says Philipp Westermeyer about the construction of the OMR cosmos. “No big vision.” Just always new, good ideas.
90,000 visitors attended Rock am Ring last year. 85,000 at Wacken. And 72,000 at the OMR. At a trade fair, a specialist conference, actually, for the digital marketing industry.
Although: The organizers always talk about a festival. Performances by artists are included. Deichkind has already played here, Jan Delay, Marteria, the Fantastischen Vier. This year Tokio Hotel is giving a concert. And after Serena Williams last year, Kim Kardashian appears as the highlight speaker in this one. Quentin Tarantino and Ashton Kutcher were also there. Just like many other big names like Gary Vaynerchuck, Yuval Noah Harari, Scott Galloway, Luisa Neubauer and Lena Gercke. Philipp Westermeyer apparently gets them all. Or?
No, no, there are a few people there that he’s been digging for a while now, he says. Very large. “Well, like Elon Musk, Jeff Besos,” he says. And Jay-Z as a music act, he personally thinks that’s really cool too.
The Westermeyer principle: “There was no plan, no big vision”
Given that the countdown is running – when we meet, it’s less than three weeks until the OMR 2024 – Westermeyer seems very relaxed. He takes a good hour for our conversation. A conversation about how someone who wanted to do something with media became one of the most successful event organizers in Germany. “There was no plan,” he says. “No big vision.” Just always new, good ideas. And we talk about what comes next. So when something like the OMR has grown to the maximum. How is this continuing?
Westermeyer is someone who sees himself as the “founder of the StudiVZ generation”, but is actually from a completely different breed. He says he always had too much respect for investors. And exit was simply never his goal. Not with the OMR. Westermeyer founded two other companies and later sold them, in a classic way. But: “Something that grows out of itself, that supports itself, is not that easy to create. And don’t give it up lightly.”
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What can you learn from someone like Westermeyer? His product, the OMR Festival and the companies around it, the OMR Popstars but also the software rating platform OMR Reviews – all successful in the sense of having a wide reach and being profitable so that 400 people can be employed. And the 45-year-old has achieved a completely different, possibly even more important goal: as he says, he is happy with what he does. “I do things that I really enjoy, and I enjoy my work every day. I’m not saving the world – but maybe I can at least send signals.”
Philipp Westermeyer’s career start in Hamburg
Philipp Westermeyer comes from the Ruhr area, from Essen. There, He said that in an interview with NDR, everyone dreams of moving to Hamburg. Because it is considered the most beautiful city in the world. Here, where he has his company today, in the middle of the ski jump, it is really beautiful on a sunny spring day. There are cafes, bistros, bars and people sitting outside everywhere. Like everything, the location grew organically, says “Westi,” as his employees call him. First there was just one floor, then another, then the whole house. TV chef Tim Mälzer runs the Bullerei restaurant right next door.