Here to Stay, or Why Attend a Conference?

It is true, people. As it turns out, this Internet advertising thing isn’t a fluke. It is a real business with real people doing real things and making real money.

Is it anything like the heady, absinthe-and-Dilaudid days of yore? No. But the strong have actually survived.

Two weeks ago, MediaPost held their Media Forecast 2003 two-day conference in New York City at the Yale Club. One day focused on issues concerning traditional media. The second day focused on online media.

Approximately 130 people showed up for the event that dealt with the topics du jour of online media. Yes, that’s 130 people. When was the last time you were at a formal gathering of online media professionals that pulled 130 people? With the reports I’ve read about the attendance of other conferences of late, with the sounds of crickets chirping and the rustle of tumbleweeds filling empty convention halls (like the recent InternetWorld in New York), the impression being given is that the final enthusiasm for online advertising has finally and nearly completely faded. In the last 6 months, I’ve been to two conferences that prove this industry is far from being washed out – the iMedia Buyer’s Summit and the Forecast 2003. And I’ll tell you, the sounds I heard were not hollow wind blowing through caverns and echoing kerplunks of water droplets in an empty fern cave.

It was passionate conversation being had with others who are still firm believers in this business and have a very real conviction that this thing isn’t just advertising’s equivalent of the Pet Rock.

More than a few people I’ve talked to about the conferences they attend say the same things: that the structured content of these events never reveals anything new. The perspectives presented are never anything that the smart people working in this business couldn’t have already surmised, nor is the information given out something that the active members of this industry couldn’t come by during the course of their staying abreast of the business.

The real benefit of these kinds of events is getting industry thought leaders together in one place to organically exchange ideas with one anther that might not otherwise ordinarily be exchanged from within the silos of our daily work-about existence. It is running into Joe Jaffe in the hallway of a hotel and having a spontaneous conversation about TiVo and walking away from that conversation with a whole new perspective. It is talking to Chris Theodoros from Google and thinking about search engine and contextual marketing in a new way. It is the manifestation of the Hegelian dialectic: Thesis – antithesis – synthesis. I’ve got one notion about how or why something is. Someone else has another. And it is in the engagement of these two poles that can give birth to a third, as-of-yet unconsidered idea. It is the collision of ideas that makes gathering with those who share passions and interests of such value and the reason to attend industry conferences from time to time.

The continued passion of those in this business is proof that we are not simply dealing with remnant fanaticism. If we were, the industry would have broken down into small, disorganized cells of quirky monasticism like Essene sects hiding out in the Caves of Qumran rather than being a fairly well organized industry of common interests with common goals working out of a sense that what we are all doing is actually “right.” From these common interests and common goals comes a reason to formally congregate. It so happens that conferences can facilitate this. All conferences are NOT created equal. But that does not mean that NONE of them are valuable.

How we move forward and how the work all gets done is still up for debate (and what business models are built from), but this is the real deal.

And if you are still here, you are the real deal, too.

By Jim Meskauskas
Courtesy of http://www.MediaPost.com