Ad:Tech London 2006 …
Last week, we had what some call, a ‘fusion event’ which attracts the best from the worlds of Advertising/Marketing and that of Technology. Yes, that was precisely what Ad:Tech London was all about - All that’s new media !
As the market for Online Advertising increases, events like Ad:Tech London and Internet World are gaining more and more popularity. What makes such events more popular and accessible to general audience is the diversity of exhibitors and also the great conferences which cover topics ranging from email marketing to mobile marketing, affiliates to user-generated content. The focus, here, is not on the technology driving the various sectors but on the practical experience that will allow people to innovate, experiment and capitalise on this change.
The event which happened over a span of 2 days had all the major players participating. Although, I wanted to make it to the event on both the days, but work kept me away on the 1st day.
While on my quick visit on the later half of the 2nd day, I had a great time looking around and exploring the innovative services being offered. I spent some time checking out Microsoft’s new Adcenter service. With its bold claims (targeted at the UK audience) saying that the traffic from Adcenter generates more sales than that from Adwords, and richer data availability it surely packs some punch. Ad-Center as it says, will give advertisers sophisticated information about consumers, including their location, age, gender and sometimes, their level of wealth. That’s more than what Google and Yahoo offer. But with more and more advertising $’s being spent online it won’t be long before Google and Yahoo start offering such services. But, that’s absolutely great because this competition will in turn put more and more features in front of the common advertiser/marketer. Infact, I recently read an article where Bill Gates was quoted saying, “We will keep them (Google) honest in the sense of being able to do better on those (search and advertising) things, bring a new angle to it,” he said. “The intense competition in this business is what makes it fun.”
After playing around with the Adcenter tool I made my way towards an awesomely large part of the gallery floor, dominated by none other than Big G. Yeah, Google had set up a complete ‘Google University’ and ‘Google Surgery’ at the rear end of the gallery floor. Google university was in all senses a university experience with seating arrangements for over a 100 people and two giant screens. They had informative sessions on using Search Engine Marketing and getting the max. bang outta the buck ! I quite liked the idea of having small booths called the ‘Google Surgery’ where they met up with clients/AdWords advertisers, helping them optimize their AdWords campaigns.
It was also good to see people taking interest in the Long Tail of search keywords, and it was evident with the presence of two of the big players in Keyword Analysis - WordTracker and Keyword Discovery (Trellian). Being a long time customer of Wordtracker, I surely wanted to meet them. I met up with Anne Artis, of Wordtracker before playing their keyword game(I won nothin’ !). It was surely one of the most engaging talk I had that evening. Anne and myself shared our views on the current scenario of keyword analysis. I also pointed out Russell Wright’s ThemeZoom to Anne, which surprisingly she wasn’t aware of, as ThemeZoom is fast growing its LSI based keyword analysis service. I know Russell from Portalfeeder and can vouch for his offerings. We also talked about the recent attack on Jim Morris’s Nichebot and SitePoint; and how it affected the keyword service providers. (Nothin’ major! thou) All in all, it was time well spent. In the end, Anne even gave me a Wordtracker T-shirt which says “Amateurs Guess, Wordtracker Knows”. Thank You, Anne !
I kept moving around the floor looking at more and more services and was amazed the see the number of analytics based services on offer to optimize your SEM campaigns. It seems, its the flavour of the day to make your own ‘propriety’ campaign management software. I wonder how much money the smaller players make considering that Google is offering a wonderful service in Google Analytics - Free !
Also were present, some exhibitors, who were taking the keyword game to a completely new level by offering SEO services, to better position your site in non-english speaking countries(with non-english keywords). I spoke to WebCertain and BigMouthMedia to get more details on how they went about optimizing sites for non-english audience. I also went ahead and hosted a very simple translation tool that allows you to convert your english keyword list into other languages. The tool uses Babel Fish translation engine and can be found here - Keyword Translation Tool
As I kept moving through the floors, I met up with so many familiar faces and it was great meeting up with all of them. Also ran into, a friend who plays 5-a-side with us. Turns out he handles Online Marketing for PartyPoker.com. I never knew that, he was into Internet Marketing and handling such a large volume of PPC traffic. Even he wasn’t aware of my involvement in niche marketing.(guess we both thought, football is the only thing we have in common !). He gave me some goodies as well … including PartyPoker hats and a deck of playing cards .. thanks !
I really wanted to attend a few seminars but lack of time didn’t allow me to .. had I done that (attend some seminars), there would surely have been much more to share with you guys. But, don’t ya worry, I am soon going to be putting up a lot of info ! I’ll be going to an IM seminar this weekend and will be live blogging (provided I am allowed to, and I get WiFi access). More on this later.
[tags]ad tech london 2006, wordtracker, keyword analysis, online marketing and new media, anne artis, google university, google surgery, google analytics, microsoft adcenter, keyword discovery, webcertain, big mouth media, im seminar [/tags]
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