By Chris Heine, Reporter, and Stacy Cornell, Customer & Editorial Development Manager

“The best way to judge an AD:TECH [conference] is by the parties that are thrown,” quipped one rep for a contextual advertising services firm while grabbing a beer in the New York Hilton skyway last week.

Yes, with an estimated 12,000 marketers crowded into one hotel, having a good time was on many attendees' minds. Still, you can be sure some marketing, learning and behind-the-scenes dealing was going on, too.

There’s little question that a circus feel was as “in” as ever with this latest AD:TECH. Leggy models fronted booths, a little person hawked the wares of an emarketing services firm, a beer bus hauled attendees from party to party … well, you get the picture.

But this scene didn’t just symbolize a bunch of conventioneers partying into the wee hours. No, it also demonstrated the emarketing sector’s clean bill of health. After all, company execs don’t foot the bills for these types of extracurricular activities when they’re more worried about getting out of the fiscal year alive than making a positive impression on the community.

“I have been talking to people non-stop,” said one attendee. “If nothing else, what we are seeing indicates that the industry is in a good place.”

So, if you couldn’t make it, here’s what you missed:

-> Big shots like Omniture, Google, Ask.com and DoubleClick showed up with booths large enough to alert your periphery. Content management services populated the floors while the email set admitted to feeling a little out of place.

“I am not sure if this is our crowd as much as I thought it would be,” confessed one email marketing services rep.

-> Click fraud, contextual advertising, IPTV and mobile were noteworthy ear-grabbers throughout the conference. Speakers and attendees reverberated what analysts have been saying for some time now: mobile advertising is going to be huge, but it’s moving along very slowly.

-> As expected, social networking platforms like YouTube, FaceBook and MySpace were hot topics, although video in general may have been the most discussed marketing subject of all.

Tuesday’s keynote presentation “The Online Video Revolution: A Marketer’s Dream or a Consumer-Generated Mess?” was probably the pivotal event in that regard. Suzie Reider, CMO of YouTube, declared, “Users upload 65,000 videos a day, and we are still seeing 100 million videos watched per day.”

CNN president Jonathan Klein said: “We’re not seeing enough video. We need to get users to click through more.”


Useful links related to this article:

AD:TECH's Official Show Blog with loads of commentary and notes from
attendees:
http://adtechblog.com/

AD:TECH New York:
http://www.ad-tech.com/ny.asp