The Permuto team was out and about that the Ad-Tech conference in uncharacteristically balmy San Francisco (April 21-23, 2009). This popular annual conference is the intersection of business, marketing, advertising, and some web technology. Overall, the conference is a proxy of the health of the online advertising industry which can be summed up in one word... industrious.
This year, the venue Moscone West was quite a bit smaller than in years past. The current state of the economy has slimmed down the number and size of the booths. For example, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft had always had a sizable booths were much smaller presences than years before. Yahoo! did not have a booth but a meeting room. Google had a slimmed down booth and a meeting room. Microsoft was pretty much a no-show on the expo floor this year.
Despite the slimmer list of exhibitors, the turnout at the show was excellent. The show floor was extremely crowded and bustling with people. There was definitely lots of energy, optimism, and excitement in the air with a lot of business cards changing hands, catching up with old colleagues, consummating new business deals, and budding business relationships. People were definitely focused on making their business more efficient through the economic storm.
At night, the attendees of the show were treated to a bevy of parties scatter across the city hosted by VC's, ad networks, and lead generation companies. The parties were all packed to the gills and flowing with free food and drinks. A great time was had by all.
Comments
Comments are closed.