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.
