There’s a lot of empathy coming in from the latest Search Insider column. Apparently I’m not the first to wonder whether there’s more to trade shows than looking for a quick buck.
At almost every conference, the brand marketers are the most sought-after attendees. They’re the ones controlling the seven, eight, or nine-figure budgets and have the company names on their badges that your friends have actually heard of. They sometimes even form their own organizations that have their own private conferences, such as the Internet Strategy Forum (the ISF recently told me, when inquiring about joining, that they don’t "have a membership category for vendors"–using the insidious v-word, no less).
This led me to wonder what would happen if we vendors threw a party and didn’t invite the marketers. What if we could talk amongst ourselves for a night? After two days of attending Ad:Tech San Francisco last week and having had only one conversation with a marketer (I couldn’t find marketers anywhere), I knew exactly what that felt like. And it felt great.
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Show comments Hide commentsDavid,
I read your Search Insider article titled “Ad:Tech SF: No Marketers, No Worries” posted on 05/02/06 and wanted to correct your statement about the Internet Strategy Forum.
This information was actually all included in the e-mail message that you received from the Internet Strategy Forum on 04/24/06 after you inquired about membership.
While it IS the case that ISF members are currently client-side (what you refer to as marketers) only, our conference (called the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit) is completely open to the public and has been since we launched it in 2004. In fact, we WANT both marketers and vendors (see “Who should attend the Executive Summit” at http://www.internetstrategyforum.org/ES2006). To the benefit of everyone who attends, the conference has been filled to capacity with a mix of both since we started it.
Also, we are involved with the vendor community in a number of other ways (again as detailed in our response to your membership inquiry as noted below) and is actively looking at ways to start a vendor membership category. In fact, we hope to have an announcement about a new way to engage the vendor community at our Executive Summit conference on July 13th. In the meantime, I invite your input on what would work for vendors input into those discussions.
Thank you.
SG
__________________________________
Steve Gehlen
Founder & Executive Director
Internet Strategy Forum
W: http://www.internetstrategyforum.org
E: steve.gehlen@internetstrategyforum.org
P: 971-223-3838
F: 971-223-3840