My 4/23/06 post transitioned from trying to help Search Marketing's reputation to exposing Deceptive Websites. I went to ad:tech S.F. to compare the one day, 3/9/06, ad:tech IMPACT Dallas Conference to it. The San Francisco conference was 2 1/2 days, so it was bigger and better (so was the colorful entrance shown in the photo =click all photos to enlarge).
I will not be going to ad:tech Chicago even though I do recommend it to those that want to network, learn, meet and collaborate with speakers and firms that you've read about on the web, along with peers. However, I must point out some conspicuous observations I made. First, most attendees need to research the speakers and sessions better, and ask "prepared in advance", tough questions vs. just listening or taking notes.
Second, AdRANTs mentions ad:tech chair Susan Bratton saying there would be 9,000 attendees. I'm optimistically skeptical about that number as I counted (approx.) the number of seats in the keynote session room #134. There were only about 1,400 seats (tops) plus standing room. I contacted Moscone, and they confirmed a capacity of 1,340 for a theater style configuration in that room. So, when I heard Susan say there were about 9,000 attendees, I was wondering how many of them registered for one day passes or just Exhibit Hall passes?
I've contacted ad:tech for a breakdown, and here it is from Warren Pickett: "..we had over 9,000 pre-registered attendees (actually our final numbers were 10,000 pre-registered and 7,000 attendees that came through the doors). The keynote room was actually set for 900. Most of the 7,000 walk-in attendees were exhibit hall only attendees and we had more than 1000 full-conference attendees." Since the Exhibit Hall was free up to 3/24/06 pre-registration ($75 thereafter), that explains the large numbers of total pre-registered attendees (10,000) missing from the keynote session room (it was still packed with SRO only, though).
The Segway shown in the Exhibit Hall here, was not necessary as Moscone North had a "convenient to get around" layout with less walking between sessions than I expected.
ad:tech IMPACT Dallas's site (which has now been changed to get ready for the next series of one day conferences) did not, at first, have a disclaimer on the "agenda" and "speakers" pages saying that not all speakers listed would appear at each one day IMPACT location. When I pointed this out after attending (and not seeing some speakers I went there to see), V.P. Don Knox immediately added that disclaimer in both places. So, I give kudos to their management for not wanting to appear deceptive with their website information.
Another observation I've made after going to a Consumer Reports WebWatch Conference, SES San Jose, PubCon, Las Vegas, and now ad:tech, San Francisco is that after a lifetime of mostly successful "reading" of people (I'm not always right) in sales, marketing, and advertising, I find some speakers to be more
"genuine" than others (their passion is their work, and not just getting rich). This could be due to their experience level in public speaking, but many times I've felt that other speakers look at you with "dollar signs in their eyes." It makes you feel that they are there to "get" more than to "give". Sometimes these "get" people show their true colors when they speak. Others are more clever about it. That said, I want to give my opinion that John Battelle(far right in photo above) and Mike Grehan are more "genuine" than many of the speakers at conferences. There are others, of course, but those were my favorites at ad:tech San Francisco.
As for the conference itself (photo is the entrance to Moscone North), there are many good posts about it, so all I'll do is link to two (AdRANTs is above). The one I like (because he mentions the conspicuous absense of MSN) is from John Furrier who has a three part podcast of the first day's keynote session: "Mark Kvamme Says Internet Advertising Poised to Blow Up Big", then "Online Ad Industry Just Scratching the Surface of the Internet, Says Kvamme", and finally "Here Comes the Next Google Says AdTech 2006 Keynote Mark". Even though it is evident why venture capitalist, Mark Kvamme's opinion is so optimistic about online advertising, I like what he had to say, and agree with most of it. It is worth the "listen time".
This Brokerblogger has had it with conferences for a while, and intends on doing more consumer advocate work in regard to deceptive or misleading websites, as the online advertising world and broadband adoption gets bigger. This last PodTech Network podcast tells why "Mark Kvamme Says He's Monitoring Broadband Adoption".
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