Ian Fernando » san francisco

Ad tech San Francisco 2011 was Smaller

Ian — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:56:06 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

I got back a day earlier than my planned San Francisco trip. The reason was because I was hella tired from the show. Also everything seemed a bit different. Ad tech was held at Moscone West building and not the Moscone Center. The Moscone West had 3 floors dedicated to adtech, where as in the past it was just 1 huge floor at the Moscone center.

I arrived Sunday and I hanged out with Wes Mahler and Brian Evans most of the day until the mastermind dinner. THe dinner was a great meeting event with some big names in it. Monday at the show, I just didn’t go. I went and met up with Kevin and we all went and toured Nappa Valley. Tuesday, I did go to the show and had meetings in the morning back to back. I found some great traffic sources and also talked to some users who owned CRM, in the process of taking on the advertiser world!

For adtech itself it seemed smaller, there are 3 floors. The bottom 2 were exhibit halls and the top 3rd was where all the speakers, keynotes, sessions, beer garden etc is located. So it was just walking around was tiring in itself. For me I was tired after Sunday because I went hard and experience a HangOver movie effect the following day.

The show itself is like any other trade show, a bunch of vendors and people that don’t know what they are talking about when you start to talk about real numbers. You also see the repeated booths as well. The best meetings I had was the ones away from the booths and with vendors that didn’t have booths. It seemed they were more into the meeting and their projects than the show.

I also went out and soft launch a new software which will be a game changer for the industry as well. I go through these issues all the time and I decided why not share my tools with everyone. So that went very well actually, more ideas that I expected as well. I met up with friends especially with HasOffers, GetAds, adKnowledge, Jonathan Volk, Dustin ,people from dk’s ThinkTank, Jim Kukral, etc.

It is always great talking to friends and how they are growing and how they are moving around with their business.

Other than that the show was great, but slower than normal. I didn’t see much affiliates at this show, nor did I see much advertisers as well. It was weird NOT to see some people that I thought would be going not show up. But everyone grows, expands, and diversify their business.

As for the parties, I attended the Affiliate Marketer’s Ball and it turned out to be a very planned out event. At Affiliate Summit West was the first Marketers’ Ball and I guess the venue was too big because there was a ton of empty space. At adtech, it was a good sized club and everyone mixed and mingled more than the Marketer’s Ball at Summit.

We then went to 2 other parties and called it a night after, I was tired! The next day, Wednesday, I just hanged around met with some people and that was it. I decided around early afternoon I wanted to go home. My planned trip to be home is actually today, arriving at 7pm EST. I was just so tired from Sunday, Nappa Valley, and Tuesday meetings – I wanted to just go home.

So I just went to the airport to get it all situated and luckily I got the next flight out of San Francisco back to Jersey! The flight was torture, just because I haven’t worked out in 4 days, my legs started to ‘jump’. Anyways, adtech was good the meetings and networking I did was amazing.

The video I have is a mix of the show and my trip to Nappa Valley.

Ad Tech San Francisco 2010 – Wrap Up

Ian — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:14:08 +0000

The past 2 days was Ad-Tech. I honestly was not going to attend this years ad tech west in San Francisco just because I didn’t want to really go. But since I was in Cali for a while, I decided to go ahead and go. This years show was really really good because there is a lot of traffic sources and venues for marketers to venture into.

I decided to just go since I am in the area and I met up with a lot of new people and met with some of my online readers. I snaked the whole show twice and found some great new traffic sources that I will start testing or soon start testing. I met up with some great people right away and turned out to be really good people.

I met up with some great readers of the blog as well as past internet marketing friends such as Joel Comm. I flew in Tuesday and chilled with some people prior to heading to ad tech. I then started snaking the show and talked to a lot of people. During most of the day I was at ad tech I just had beers all day at the beer garden and while walking the floor.

I met up with Dustin, Bryn, Silver, AffBuzz, Jonathan Volk, Charles Ngo, Morgan, Nick Mattern, etc. It was great seeing these guys. I also decided to have lunch and celebrate the 1st year anniversary of AffBuzz. Everyone that reads AffBuzz was there.

It definitely was fun. I had the chance to talk to a couple people from the Irvine meetup and talked to Volk about ideas and marketing in general. After the celebration I headed back to the conference and walked the whole thing again.

The show was a good and great hit. One aspect I did not like was un-knowledgeable people at the booths. I think they prey on stupid and naive users. Even one of the biggest platforms didn’t know what they were talking about. I walked to the Facebook booth and asked about quality issues and how they do quality scoring…

The reason is because I got a daily spending limit on Facebook ads.

I asked away at the Facebook booth, but this girl did not understand what I was asking. I want to work with them and better understand their QS platform and how it is being judge besides the obvious (CTR, Spending, Voting, etc). The girl didn’t understand or even had a clue they had a user base voting system… sighs…

Well anyways that night the parties are all the talk by the end of the show floor. Everyone basically had their mind set either at the PPC.bz/EWA party and the Clickbooth party. I went to PPC.bz first and chilt there and had a great conversation with Pulse360. I met up with Ryan Eagle and Barman at the party as well as other affiliates in the industry.

After the PPC.bz party I went off to hit up Clickbooth’s party. I met up with old friends from past conferences and just hanged out for a little bit. After the last drink of the night I decided to call it quits. I been drinking all day during the conference and I was beat. I literally just walked back and took a cab back.

The next day…

I simply just met up with people I needed to meet up with and then hanged around the show floor. I found a cool twitter analytics system called Tap11 and got more information on Twitter advertising called 140Proof. I do not know why but social traffic and twitter stuff amazes me, since its conversational data that is being researched.

I really didn’t do much I was trying to recover from last night. I basically just hung around till dinner with a couple friends and then met up with Wes Mahler himself! I was beat as hell and decided to call it quits for the night and day.

Ad-Tech is a great show to find new sources of traffic and branch out into other venues of marketing. Since the issue I had with Google and Facebook I am branching out into new venues and traffic sources. Ad-Tech is a definite show to go to… I might have to hit up Ad-Tech Japan soon…

Ad Tech Day 1: Keynote and Lap Dances

Ian — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:15:07 +0000

The first real day of Ad-Tech was very interesting and educational especially the keynote. The keynote showed a lot of information about our digital age. Jeffrey Hayzlett spoke about Kodak and how they have changed their business model to accommodate the changing economy. How they market and how they approach and what the new brand the consumer sees.

Kodak has changed the perception on how consumers view them as and how the consumers see them. They have changed how they are viewed on the Internet as well. Creating social groups and social networks to help with the demand of digital pictures.

Kodak has changed base on the growing industry, with more people moving from analog to digital – Kodak adopted. The re-branding has helped consumers recognized Kodak as the new digital printing, photo sharing, low ink toners, etc. Being seen as the gateway to the new era, they want to stay right side by the consumer. This allows them to relate with the average consumer whether it be price, needs, in expensive products etc – Kodak is there to help with the changing industry.

More and more marketers and companies see the Internet as a new place to hang out, a place to share and interact without face-to-face contact or even picking up a phone. Companies such as Kodak see the opportunity and want to tackle this industry as close as possible to their digital photography, digital marketing meets digital photography â€“ makes sense.

Exhibit Hall:

This was huge. John Chow says it is not as big as CES but I think it was huge. This would be my second time going to a big convention and compared to Affiliate Summit West, the booths are bigger, more louder, more people, and the hall was bigger! I toured the place for a little with Wes Mahler and John Chow.

Later we went a head and decided to split off as I wanted to meet all my affiliate managers â€“ that had booths this year. John was just throwing footballs in to the crowds of people, evil John evil!

There were a lot of new business aspects such as digital security, security of user data, PPC analytics, email marketing, etc. There was so many a lot were geared towards digital marketing that I did not see a lot of bloggers nor affiliates. Strangely enough some bloggers found me as well as affiliate marketers. Even networks read my blog, which is kind of strange, but readers are readers especially if they read it all the time.

I met with all of my affiliate managers I believe that had booths, even new networks that I recently just joined. It was fun, crowded, informative, and tiring. After several hours talking and engaging with several booths I went back to the hotel.

After Exhibit Hall:

After visiting the exhibit hall and talking to some people I met up with a new blogger who wanted to learn all about affiliate marketing but is scared to jump into it. So far he has spent over 5k in learning courses and ebooks and audio to learn affiliate marketing, yet he is â€˜scaredâ€™ to jump in. I can feel for him as I was once there and scared to lose the money I have. But 5k in seminars, ebooks, and other aspects of marketing might be a waste if he does not actually do the affiliate marketing for himself.

Marketing alone is not just knowing the knowledge but also doing it and getting the experience. What is all the knowledge with out experience? I also met up with another new person who wanted to get into affiliate marketing and wanted to know how to get out of a 9-5 job. Later in the day Wes Mahler and I met up with him as well as the other person we met up with during the exhibit. We all had dinner and discussed multiple dimensions of affiliate marketing and exchanged ideas.

Later that evening we went to an affiliate network party which later then became several affiliate network parties. The first party we went we engaged our new friends to the affiliate network to get some exposure to what affiliate marketing is. Engagement with the affiliate managers and even discuss how it can better help them in the future as far as income.

As far as the private parties, which proved to be a better place to network and have a more intimate discussion with your affiliate, the night soon turned into chaos. There were several parties that night. We went to 2 bigger affiliate network parties and then ended up going home.

Later that night I met up with Ms. Danielle and Bob at another party at a local bar. Which then once i arrived we went to another bar – erhm Gentlemen’s Club. Everything was great I met new people that are all affiliates, but didn’t really get to talk too much especially if women are dancing in front of your face. Just to let you know the West Gentlemen’s Club has nothing on the East =P! It was very entertaining and one of the big guys just kept buying lap dances for everyone. I was just sitting and then bam a new lady shaking it. But it was entertaining!

I was tired by then and we all took our separate ways back to the hotel.

Pictures from some of the parties, these are from Day 2:

Overall of San Francisco and Ad:Tech 2008

Ian — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:24:47 +0000

The next couple days I will post about what I learned and experience at Ad Tech and San Francisco. I just want o give you an overall experience of how San Francisco was and the general of Ad:Tech. San Francisco is a great place I do not think it is better than Jersey or make this a West vs East thing but it has its good sides.

First day it was exciting and exciting, you will see the video below on what I have experienced the first day. Over all it was exciting I got to meet up with Tracking202 CEO Wes Mahler and did not realize my hotel was next to his Mac Mansion (soon to be). So we had a night out and that night there were already pre parties for Ad:Tech, but I was tired from the flight so I didn’t bother with them. I just chilled and learned a lot from Wes that night.

Touring San Francisco was amazing – there were a lot of hills and ups and downs, as well as wind! I took the San Francisco experience and took a trolley around town. I met up with Bob and Krystyl and we all toured San Francisco. I am use to the city and San Francisco is really not much different with the exception of the wind. I wanted to go a cross the Golden Bridge but it was too windy, so windy I thought I was going to be picked up and carried away, that is how strong it was.

Some Pictures:

After that night was gone by I went to the hotel to get ready for tomorrow. I uploaded a video of myself with my phone but for some reason it is not viewable on the YouTube network but on the mobile via my phone it was viewable and playable… strange. The next 2 days or so I will talk about the keynotes and the experience from Ad-Tech, exciting!

Ad Tech Wrap Up:

Ad Tech was very exciting but in my nature of online marketing right now it did not seem to fit me. Affiliate Summit West proved to be more beneficial to me just because everyone was a blogger or an affiliate. Ad-Tech is I think geared towards the bigger businesses and startups. A lot of apps and services range from $1k to $40k a month. A lot of the services also looks for heavy volume, so not a lot of the booths really appealed to me nor did it proved to be in my nature, but a good thing to know.

There were affiliate networks there but not a lot of affiliate networking, whenever I spoke to someone it would be either about them being a writer, coder, marketing, media buyer etc. So it really did not pertain to me too much and we really did not have that much to talk about because I was just really not that interested at this time, later down the line maybe.

Tomorrow I will talk about the first day and the keynote itself – just a lot of unpacking I have to do and to get ready for. Also, this weekend I will be ready to setup my LLC and look at new credit cards!

Well here is a video of all the mini videos and picture mashup.

Apologize for grammar and typos, I will start to get back in my editing once I finish unpacking.

Ad-Tech 2008: San Francisco – First Day

Ian — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:09:29 +0000

This is crazy let me just say that. This is way bigger and has a lot of more people in the exhibit hall and at the keynote. Ad-Tech is geared towards digital marketing since we are slowly growing towards the digital age. I have taken some pictures on my phone, so if you have been following me via Twitter, you will have probably seen them. The better pictures will be uploaded this weekend or so.

Monday there were parties already starting up, a pre-game party before ad-tech. I decided to take that time and meet up with Wes Mahler and look at campaigns and show me how scaling works and how he scales vs how I can improve the way I scale. Also, I have met up with Bob, Ms. Danielle, and John Chow. John Chow is a funny and entertaining guy, he started throwing footballs into the exhibit hall, you will see the videos soon on his blog.

I have also met up with my affiliate managers that had booths. I went out to lunch with CPA Empire and some affiliates. It was a great tiring day. The keynote was a great experience as well. The return of the Kodak Moment!!

Well, here are some pictures I took from my cell phone, make sure to follow me on twitter for more pictures. Also apologize for my typing/grammar.

More and better pictures to come!