AD:TECH - Where Are The Search Sessions?

[Garrett]

I caught up with Kevin Lee of Did-It.com in the press room at the AD:TECH conference. He was about to give a presentation at a session on search but he squeezed in a little chat with me.

He noted the marked lack of search engine marketing sessions at AD:TECH (something I'd been thinking too). He pointed out that a recent study showed that 40% of media speding goes to search, and about 30 - 35% of the vendors in the exhibit hall were search related (a rough estimate), while only 5% of the sessions (2 of them to be exact) covered search.

Will we see an increase in search sessions in future AD:TECH conferences? Perhaps, though perhaps they're working on a conference that is purely search related?

Overall he said the conference was well attended - the hype is coming back. Nibley of Marsteller said the same thing - the online industry is acting confident again, getting its swagger back.

He also mentioned that the head hunters are back - he was approached by someone asking if he needed any new personnel.

In an interesting bit of conference strategy he suggested that AD:TECH require a fee for the exhibit hall to keep out the tire kickers and junior employees stealing pens (my characterizations there - Kevin referred to them in more professional terms).

It was good to catch up with him - he's an old player in the SEM industry and a regular search engine writer over at clickZ.

[bhartzer]

I'm not surprised about the lack of search sessions at Ad:tech. The advertising industry is still waking up to SEM, and still just doesn't get it yet.

I'm seeing more and more agencies start to get into SEM (Search Engine Marketing), so I would suspect that we will begin to see more and more of these sessions at ad:tech in the future.