• by Jack Feuer , March 4, 2008

So I'm packing for the 4As Media Conference in Orlando, and I hope the fact that the confab is being held in a place with the same name as a painful skin disease isn't a bad omen.

This year's venue, Rosen Shingle Creek, sounds like a place fat cats go to play golf, take a massage and get away from underinsured ethnics. You know, like the places where what used to be called the 4As Management Conference but is now the Leadership Conference is held every year. (Even the one in New Orleans a few years ago was held at a Ritz-Carlton.)

Snootiness was never a problem with the Media Conference, which used to alternate between Disney World and the Big Easy, destinations that are synonymous with "fun" and "excitement," albeit of very different kinds. So the transplantation of the 4As private-club predispositions onto its more egalitarian media event is unsettling, particularly since its new leader is promising a revitalization of the almost 100-year-old organization.

One thing that hasn't changed is the media confab's love of view-from-300,000-feet umbrella themes. This time it's "Digital Changes Everything."

We kind of knew that in 2004.

OK, I get that you need to get this, and you don't yet. In fact, I just finished writing a freelance article on doing business in virtual worlds, where I think I saw the first, furtive glimpses of Web 3.0, so I know you really don't get it. Like an old dog, you're still doing your old tricks, only in a new dog park.

Consider: Marketers are shifting dollars from everywhere else and pouring them into digital media, agencies are becoming "digitally centered" and putting digital executives in charge of their shops. Independent digital agencies are snapped up like the last knishes on the boardwalk, and the industry in general is thinking about this subject as objectively as the press covers Obama.

Sound familiar?

It should, because that's exactly the approach you took with the Internet itself. And what you did a few years later with branded entertainment. It's what you did with television in the basement offices of what used to be called "media departments" a half-century ago. What I'm sure your ancestors did with radio, print, town criers, wandering minstrels and paintings on cave walls.

There always has to be an "It" channel with you people. So much for media agnosticism.

But as I've written, I have an enduring affection for this conference. Which, with a couple of tough exceptions after 9/11, has been a celebration of the media discipline's ascendance, and thus, a generally jolly affair. There's also, every now and then, something substantive to chew on. And where else can you get 1,200 or so media agency executives and industry exhibitors together in the same place, often drunk, which is the best time to shake them down for news?

Plus, the general session speeches on Thursday morning are all only 30 minutes long.

Oh, and the Rosen Shingle Creek golf course looks lovely.