ad:tech Day Two: Oh, There’s the Recession

After the first day of ad:tech I thought things were going pretty well for the industry.  Day two gave me time to make some more sessions (I live twittered them) and spend some time on the two levels of the exhibit hall.  Many booths were noticeably smaller (Google) or missing (Yahoo!), the tchotchkes were noticeably minimal if they even had them, and the parties were quite often cash bar.

Years past the trip through the show floor for goodies yielded a plethora of cool, weird, and boring items (SF2007, SF 2007, NY 2008) to tempt you to stop by the booth.  This year there were a few worthwhile things like the purple octopus, but it was mostly pens and handouts.

It looked like there were a ton of parties (eight Tuesday night that I knew of), but very few were open bar.  In the past, every party I was invited to (and as press I get invited to most) was open bar. Companies are still spending the money to get their name out there and make a splash, but they seemingly can’t afford the extra outlay for the alcohol. Not all parties were cash.  The beer was flowing freely in the Beer Garden at the Affiliate Summit Networking party Tuesday evening.

There were some positives. ad:tech added a new part of the show called ADSPACE, dedicated to “contextual advertising.” I have to put it in quotes because there were a number of sessions that lightly touched on contextual ads and got into ad serving, performance marketing, metrics, affiliate programs, etc.

One session was titled “Beyond Text Ads: In Text, Affiliate, Led-Gen, eBay and More!”  This alone shows that ad:tech is expanding and growing into a show that covers all the ways people monetize their sites.  The performance based industry was well represented and every mention I heard talked about how the ROI was superior to other channels.  There was some great discussion on tracking multiple channels and that dollars are being shifted to the channel because it is measurable and performs so well. Real issues such as fraud were brought up, but it was discussed rationally and affiliates were not painted negatively with a broad brush.

I think the addition of the new ADSPACE track and exhibit area was a great idea and will help improve ad:tech as well as the performance marketing industry as a whole.

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