Lessons in Marketing at AdTech New York

We’ve only just returned home from Adtech New York followed by a quick weekend in Toronto to visit family.

Adtech was huge, and I found it fascinating to observe many of the different marketing tactics used to grab the attention of almost 11,000 attendees.

The first thing I heard after the elevator door closed for the first time was a loud and serious voice wanting to know whether I was concerned about click fraud. Well heck ya, so I turned my attention to watch ABCSearch’s elevator ad for the first time of many over the course of the next 3 days.

Five minutes after getting to the room Targusinfo slid a nice gold and black ‘ticket-like’ note under the door inviting me to booth #708 for a sweet treat. I thought that was a particularly slick tactic for getting attendees to take note of their booth number, considering there were more than 250 booths scattered across separate areas and several floors… although not sure how they got #708 in that case.

Once in the exhibit hall, I had to wonder how the staffers at all those booths were going to hand out all those trinkets (about 50 million pens and spongy balls) to all 11,000 attendees before the end of the convention.

I did my part and lightened their overall load when I stopped by to say hi to Evan Lovett of eAdvertising. A few folks such as Jay Berkowitz of Ten Golden Rules dropped off goodies for me and then lightened my load of books during my book signing on Wednesday afternoon.

Ed noted that he hadn’t seen ‘booth babes’ (young ladies dressed in extremely skimpy outfits) for many, many years at the technical trade shows he used to attend — and then suggested that this industry probably wasn’t quite as mature as was implied during our ‘Evolution of Affiliate Marketing‘ panel. Having tried unsuccessfully to source information from booth babes at other shows, I had to agree. But I suppose they manage to give a lot of pens to ecommerce industry pros, most of whom (like me) can no longer use a pen… not legibly anyway.

I was disappointed to see Zango’s booth in the far corner of the registration hall… or anywhere in the conference for that matter. I mean… isn’t it bizarre that a company whose model is based on stealing traffic, sales and commissions is allowed to exhibit at a reputable event? Hmmm.

The subject and Zango’s name came up again during the QnA portion of our panel and most participants found it reassuring to hear affiliate network executives such as Michael Hines (Zanox), Jivan Minhas (Advaliant) and Chris Henger (Double Click Performics) reiterate that advertisers with any such involvement are sumarily removed from their networks. I directed folks to my article in Revenue and reminded them that a good lawyer is the best weapon in the war against such bad actors.

Here’s a note I received from a subscriber who read that article…

I read your article about Zango, downloaded their software and found out one of my names was being targetted heavily by competitors. I wrote the BBB, FTC, and Zango lawyer directly and within 7 days, to my surprise and delight, they removed my url from their system. They sent an official legal note as well. Thank you for the informative article.

To sum up, it was great to finally attend an adTech and pick up some new lessons in marketing. Now I’m looking forward to meeting up and talking with many NPT readers at the smaller, more intimate PPC Classroom seminar at which I’ll be speaking next month in Vegas.

(In the picture above from left to right – Rosalind Gardner, Michael Hines, Chris Henger, Jivan Minhas and Josh Greene.)

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