Diorex

I am now back from Ad:tech. I must say that of all the conferences I have attended in the past few years Ad:tech is the one that is the most about actually doing business and the least about party’s or socializing.

Not that I mind socializing, but I am not terribly interested in spending time and money to be away from my family and my employees just so I can have an excuse to get drunk. A few years older with 2 kids and 30+ employees might be the reason, but I just want to do business and get back home and ad:tech was the first conference that really delivered that.

It was packed, because of the sprawling layout of the Hilton, I have no idea how many people or even how many exhibitors showed up. In fact i walked the exhibit halls both days pretty extensively and with less than an hour to go in the show I found a whole room of 40-50 booths I had not previously been aware of.

Lots of different types of companies exhibiting which I break up into a few groups:

Client Meeters - You probably already have an account with us so come by and say hello, but we dont exactly expect a ton of new business from the show. Interesting note, Google was only search engine on floor, no Yahoo, no MSN, no Ask.

Client Needers - We will be going out of business next Thursday if you dont give us some indication of a way we can do business. We dont really know what our business model is, but we are positive we can find a way to work together. So far our biggest success has been convincing someone to front $30k for us to get a booth at the show.

Networks - With the prices paid for networks of all types in the last year, lots of new ones were showing up trying to get their fair share. Everything from ad networks with different ideas on segmentation to new approaches to ad rotation and then lots of guys saying we have 30 million impressions a month please please please buy something from us. This group I guess would also include the dozens of affiliate networks, many of which are either very specialized or are just me too type networks, the rest of the affiliate networks woould be in group 1.

Sucker Magnets - Just in case you are really desperate, the 3rd and 4th tier players of the PPC world are still around trying to sucker people into investing a few hundred into their click fraud machines.

Ghosttowns - those booths that never seem to have anyone anywhere in the vicinity except the one guy/gal hoping someone will talk to them. Often these booths either just have a backdrop with the company name and nothing else or hundreds of words on the backdrop that noone stops to read. The backdrop is the introduction to your company give me some reason to talk to your sales guy. I typically felt bad for these guys as I averted my eyes and tried to walk past just a little faster.

For me, the meetings are where the money is made. I met a few people as a result of this blog and expect to do significant business with at least 2 of them (woohoo finally monetizing the blog…). In at least 2 other instances deals that had been lagging for some reason or other now appear to get done. Plus a few relationship building meetings and a few that I have no idea why I agreed to them.

As for the trade show… I expect to do a little test business with a few people but nothing really blew me away.

Here are 2 that I found intriguing, I dont expect either to succeed wildly, but both ideas got me to thinking…

Raxxle.com is a social network that answers the question “Who do you look like?” Too bad they are still in Beta and could not even get advertisers at the show into the beta without a court order. The idea is that users upload a photo and then that is compared to celebrity and other photos and you find out that you look 43% like bozo the clown or somesuch. They also match you up with your “twins” who are also on the network… the interesting angle is that while you are on their site, they will show ads to you with your photo in them that say things like “Hey George, we have really cool stuff in ” and the ad has George’s picture. I smell a crash and burn… but it did get me to thinking. Whoever can show me an ad with my name and photo in it when I am surfing mainstream sites is going to get my attention and probably make a lot of money until the novelty wears off (not to mention the privacy police screaming bloody murder…) kind of like the x10 camera guy with the first internet pop-ups.

Mindset Media - These guys have a yet to launch psychographic targeting ad network. Somehow or other they categorize your visitors along about 20 different mindsets. So assertive or compassionate or creative or timid etc. They figure out what categories my visitors meet then go and advertise to others with similar characteristics. Not really demographic targeting because a 40 year old black man in seattle and a 20 year old asian woman in oklahoma might be more similar to each other than they are to other demographically similar people. What remains to be seen is how they actually categorize people, they had me take a 15 minute test, not sure they are going to get millions to do that. Otherwise I liked this idea, as I suspect many of my most profitable customers can be typecasted like this. I hope this works.

The above company (mindset media) also won my award for most creative swag. It was just a plain t-shirt with one of their mindsets on it with a funny saying. Mine says “Assertive(5) - I think I speak for everyone…” It was the only thing in the entire show I saw and wanted. Atlas had an Oxygen bar which was an interesting attempt to get people to sit and listen to their sales spiel, but I did not partake. Everyone else seemed to be giving away junk or beer or in a lot of cases nothing at all…

All in all, after now hitting at least one each of SES, Pubcon, Affiliate Summit and Ad:tech I would rank them in order of business I got from them - Ad Tech (by a mile), SES, Affiliate Summit and then Pubcon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.