The past 2 days I was at adtech NY. This is one of the other shows I recommend marketers to go to. It is a digital marketing conference which has more of a business savy feel to it. This is where a lot of affiliates come to find new traffic sources, advertisers, merchants, etc. It is a show that is dedicated to growing and more importantly expanding your online business.
I arrived on Tuesday and missed the show floor completely. So I met up with some NJ affiliates at the LimeLight CRM private gathering. My good friend which I consider a mentor to my growing business, Rich Gorman has put together a great get together of top players in the industry. It consisted of big advertisers, biz opp players, merchants, data validation services, etc. I was in awe at the type of quality users that were there and I leverage every minute of it, making great connections.
Even meeting the players of SiteScout ad network. Great and fun guys. I want to thank Rich for having me be part of this private gathering.
I then met up with Kris Trujillo of XRev Media and we had dinner with his team and other players. The dinner was amazing, good food and good company. We simply talked and discussed business and what I am doing and even exchanged ideas. Kris is another great person to just be in contact with, teaching everyone everything.
The next day, yesterday, I went a bit early and walked the show floor. I met up with more NJ affiliates and Ad Hustler at the show. I did a quick walk around, stop at certain booths and talked to people that I knew or stopped me. The show definitely looks like it grew compared to last year but it was good to be on the floor to see what new technology and what companies are up to.
I even went to the last keynote of the day. The speaker was Christian Oestlien. He mainly talked about the innovation of social media and gave out some stats about Google+. He gave examples, showed video clips, gave really amazing stats, and even some features I didn't know about.
The only issue was when it came to Q&A, he didn't answer anyones' questions directly. He simply just walked around the questions and filled it with fillers. There was no direct answer, I felt anyways - then again that is Google.
After the keynote, I met up with Max from WhatRunsWhere and had dinner with several other affiliates such as Rohail, Gabriel, and Heavy T. We went to China Grill which was an asian fusion dinner. Amazing good food and a lot of food. I didn't know it was family style and everyone got their own entree, so the table was filled with massive amounts of food. But we all took care of that and again want to thank WhatRunsWhere for having me at the dinner.
After dinner, we started planning what parties to go to. Wednesday was the day with the most parties - literally there was a list of 15 parties and gatherings I believe. I decided to go to 2 of the 15. I went and headed out to Xposure 2011 at Terminal 5, it was still pretty early so I left and headed out to Clickbooth's party. There, met up with some great friends and people at the company. It was a fun entertaining night. They had a fire lady in the middle of the middle of the dance floor spitting fire!
I def have a good history with Clickbooth and they have always taken care of me.
After Clickbooth, Heavy T and I headed back to Xposure just in time to catch Naughty by Nature on stage. They gave their RIP to Heavy D as well, respect. The event was huge. They had several performers come on stage prior to Naughty by Nature, I just went around met up with with affiliates, HasOffers, advertisers, past friends, etc. This event was the biggest I think, I mean they gave a concert to affiliates!
Naughty by Nature also did a great job performing on stage. A great show with great people!
ad tech is such a great event, just catching up with everyone in the industry is beneficial. I even got great feedback about Offer Snitch, my affiliate link monitoring platform. I got users asking me questions about it and even new users and networks wanting to know more information. I was proud about that.
Overall the show is great and if you are a growing affiliate, you definitely want to check out ad tech, it gives you a vast overview of what you are definitely missing in the online industry and not just affiliate marketing. I have talked about expanding several times on this blog prior and I even mentioned it last year as well. Growing is an essential part of business as well as curiosity of the other aspects of online marketing. There is a lot of money to be made online, so many ventures, ideas, and paths you can take. It is about meeting the right connections and these shows are the best ways to do so.
