Tropic like it's hot.

His name: Don Julio ROAS. He used to be an ordinary performance marketer. Until the night he accidentally launched a campaign without tracking. He's been on the run ever since.

Word is, he came to O/WONDER OMClub because somewhere in the crowd is the man who said, “You can't measure branding.” Don Julio sees it differently. Very differently.

The two guns are called “Reach” and “Conversion”, by the way. His sombrero protects him from wasted impressions, and his ammunition belt holds no bullets, just Europe's last working third-party cookies.

So if you meet him on 23 September, there are three rules: no small talk. No vanity metrics. And under no circumstances say, “We just need to build more awareness.” That's when he gives you the smile in the photo. And asks just one question: “¿Dónde está mi ROAS?”

Well, obviously, that's Carlos & Juan. The two are “Agile Liquid Conversion Testers”. They build drinking-game funnels for brands. Every time a user bounces from a landing page, they have to drink a tequila in real time so they can physically feel “the pain points of the customer journey”.

Their favourite story? The night they supposedly hacked the TikTok algorithm. Carlos tells every female intern they rewrote the code through pure, alcohol-fuelled quantum thinking.

Juan knows: after 14 shots, Carlos simply fell asleep on the keyboard. His face accidentally typed a line of code that increased reach tenfold before the laptop burst into flames. That's why they're doing a rain dance too :-)

This is Excelso Libre. By day, his actual name is Markus and he's Head of Controlling. The man who demands a receipt for €4.80 in hospitality expenses and walks out of meetings if someone says, “I don't have the exact figure to hand.” Nobody at the company suspected a thing. Until the 2024 Christmas party.

Markus had two Aperols and heard the words: “You wouldn't dare.” What happened next can only be pieced together from phone footage.

At 22:14, Markus disappeared into the men's toilets. At 22:31, Excelso Libre came back. Mask. Glittering suit. Two dancers. Procurement still hasn't worked out where the three cubic metres of speakers came from.

At 22:36, Excelso was standing on the conference table. At 22:41, the first office chair went flying. At 22:48, he put the managing director in a headlock. At 22:49, he got the pay rise Markus had been unable to secure for three years.

Excelso Libre has been a fixture of every salary negotiation since. Markus himself considers the whole thing deeply unprofessional. The two have never met …

This is Kevin. SDR. 🦩

He didn't fall into the pool. A prospect jumped in to escape the conversation, and Kevin followed. He calls it switching channels. He didn't lose anything in the process. His phone was in a bag. He'd seen this coming.

Nobody knows exactly what happened next. Eleven days later, a cargo ship spots a man on a flamingo, 60 nautical miles offshore. No drinking water, no land, but four bars of signal. Beside him, an octopus tops up his drink. Eight arms, eight touchpoints. His best multithreading in years.

He hasn't contacted the coastguard. He's still waiting for a response to his connection request. He's drifting towards Norway now. New market, untapped. 📈

His AE is still waiting for Kevin's recap email.

His name is Sven. His LinkedIn bio reads: “Remote-First Sales Leader | Workation Advocate | I build pipelines, not offices. 🌊”

The decision came on a Friday in March. On the forecast call, Sven said the quarter was in the bag. It was at 62 per cent. He knew, everyone knew, nobody asked.

On Monday, the work-from-home request was in. Subject: “Focus time”. He's been location-independent ever since. He still irons his shirt, though. For calls where nobody turns their camera on, and in case that one client who's been “aligning internally” since February calls back.

He has his laptop with him. He just doesn't open it any more. The number is on that laptop …

Expense claim, as requested: 1 × ironing board, €12.99; 1 × board, borrowed; 0 × expenses; 0 × client meetings. In the end, only the shirt was tax-deductible. He calls it a workation. … His VP hasn't asked since March.

This is Jean-Pierre, a bellhop at a luxury hotel, and Bruno the zebra. Years ago, someone ordered Bruno as a “little extra” for a stag party and simply never came back for him. Jean-Pierre looked after him back then. Now they both live at the hotel. Jean-Pierre sleeps in the staff room, Bruno in the presidential suite.

Here's the really strange part: Bruno now runs project management. Every Monday, they discuss KPIs, occupancy and revenue. If the numbers are good, Bruno gets a champagne bath. If they aren't, he gets one anyway.

Jean-Pierre stopped asking questions at some point. Now all he worries about is keeping the next quarterly target dry.

This is Julian. A strategy consultant who firmly believes a “holiday” is just a different place with Wi-Fi. 😎

He only meant to check his emails. Then a client asked for “one tiny change”, which turned into three calls and a new deck. Suddenly, Julian was sitting on the beach in a suit.

His team says he can work anywhere: airport, taxi, sun lounger. Only when it comes to calling it a day does the connection seem to drop.

Why is it all so urgent? Apparently, an important pitch goes out first thing tomorrow.

The pitch is actually in three weeks. 👀💻🌴

This is Carlitos, the boss of a marketing agency. His client insisted on an authentic social media campaign from the jungle, so Carlitos went out there himself.

What he hadn't planned for: the monkeys discovered his car was the perfect lookout point and have refused to come down ever since.

Carlitos now calls it “influencer marketing with organic reach” and sells the whole thing to his client as a strategy 😂

This is Victoria “Vicky” Vance.

Her red flag: she always wears sunglasses at all-hands meetings. If she takes them off, someone resigns within the next 10 minutes.

The rumour: she knows the passwords to every executive's private Spotify account and quietly uses that knowledge to blackmail her way to unlimited caffeine.

Her story: the pitch was on fire, the client was shouting, the system crashed. Vicky sipped her drink with lemon, took a drag on her cigarette and said just one sentence: “Your panic isn't included in my hourly rate.” Two minutes later, the client had signed. Out of sheer awe.

Julian, Marco, Jens and Achim are old hands at marketing. DMEXCO? Listen, kid, back then it was called Online Marketing Düsseldorf. “Back in my day …”, that's how plenty of their sentences start. But are the good old days really over?

For JJMA, the name of their own agency, the good times are only just beginning. It stands for Joint Journey Marketing Analytics. The four of them simply picked the first buzzwords that came to mind.

And last year they got thrown out of OMClub as early as Luna's “Bailando”. Who could have guessed that their idea of staging a performance-art flash mob, dancing the “Macarena” instead of “Bailando” and shoving everyone else off the stage wouldn't go down well? Back then, kid, back then OMClub would have been on its knees thanking us.

That's why JJMA are going undercover this year. They've spent a whole year growing moustaches (Achim's is stuck on, but shh, it's a sore point) and ordered the first costume they found online with four available in the right sizes.

Who would look at four sexy dancers and think they've been banned from Bootshaus since last year?

Her name is Britta. His name is Ralf. And they only meant to take a quick lunch break.

They founded an agency together in 2018. She made the clients happy, he made the presentations longer. They survived pitch after pitch, five rebrands and a client who wanted the logo changed 14 times.

Then came the exit. 7 million. Their reward: six weeks off. On day one, they lay by the pool. On day two, too. On day three, they decided never to work again. That lasted exactly 36 hours.

Now they're sitting here, drinking cocktails and already developing their next startup: “Pool2B: LinkedIn for people who don't actually want to work any more.”

The toucan is their investor, by the way. He has no money. But that beak of his can sniff out a bad idea a mile off. 🦜🍹