• by September 13, 2007

New York-based Meetup.com would seem to be one of those rare Internet phenomena--more than 64,000 MeetUps took place in July alone--that has somehow resisted a major collision with the ad world beyond Google AdSense. That has now changed...sort of.

In New York City itself, while the popular--and occasionally mocked--downtown New York Tech Meetup regularly gets hundreds of attendees monthly, the ad community has had no similar forum to discuss new ideas.

So Jeff Grill, vice president of marketing for online digital printing company Mimeo.com, started one--in conjunction with the Advertising Club of New York, where he serves on the membership committee. The fledgling Ad Club Meetup will hold its second bimonthly get-together on Sept. 17 at Yahoo, which has donated the space for both meetings. Speakers from Yahoo, Associated Content, PayPerPost and four other companies will receive five minutes each to discuss brands using content for self-promotion. The fast-paced hour-long session will conclude with Q&As from attendees.

"People are struggling to stay on top of the changes and new ideas" wrought on the ad industry by the Internet," explained Grill, who served as president of full-service ad agency The Romann Group for seven years before joining Mimeo in 2006, and has also worked at Cablevision, Young & Rubicam, Wunderman Direct and NW Ayer.

While ad dollars are now driving the online industry, he said, no forum or showcase existed in midtown Manhattan to rival the downtown Tech Meetups--especially not one with "low barriers to entry." Admission to the Ad Club Meetup is only $5.

The first Ad Club Meetup, held in July, had 41 attendees who signed up in two days to hear and question C-level executives from Deutsch, Rapp Collins, Lowe, Saatchi & Saatchi, and JWT, under the umbrella topic "Agencies on the Edge." The crowd was about evenly divided between junior, mid-career and senior-level executives, Grill said.

And what were the five-minute spiels like? "Some of them used a canned approach," Grill related, but others as hoped actually presented "something cool"--such as a combination of music and brand sponsorship from JWT, and a "very interesting thing on the video side" from Deutsch.

The Ad Club Meetup expects a turnout of over 70 for the Sept. 17 meeting, and Grill said the meetings might go monthly next year. He also boldly predicted the Ad Club Meetup "will be as big as the Tech MeetUp.

"We have all the money, but are not using that to create a platform, which is kind of cruel. There's so much innovation going on."