• by Jim Meskauskas , November 21, 2002

Howdy, folks. I’m going to try and be short and sweet this week. @d:Tech has now come and gone. Any of you reading MediaPost publications regularly will have some sense of what it was like based on Masha Geller’s daily coverage. But let me add a bit.

The conference itself was great. This year, @d:Tech was held on one floor of the New York Hilton’s conference and meeting room facilities. The setting was a bit close, but it was comfortable, and it made you feel like you were in some way a part of the community being represented. Compare this to last year’s @d:Tech which was staged in the Javits Center - an enormous cavern that helped to accentuate just how badly things had gone for the industry the year prior; this vast empty space made emptier by the fact that so few people remaining in the online advertising and marketing industry were still around. It was like walking through an Arizona ghost town – a skinny horse tied to a post; the sign for the saloon hanging from one corner, the ‘S’ dangling askance, one ‘O’ missing…

Companies with booths up to display their wares were, shall we say, ‘enough.” Not too many, but certainly more than any one dedicated maven of the online advertising and marketing industry could visit while still attending at least 2 sessions. There were comfortable, familiar companies that didn’t work so hard to get you to come to their particular station, luring the hapless passerby with insane tchotchkes or fetching “booth babes.” Instead, it was up to YOU, the wanderer, to stop at each booth to find out what was new in the world of online advertising and marketing. And you know what? The stands were stocked with intelligent, knowledgeable people who were helpful and insightful.

And the mood? Ah, you should have been there to sense the mood. No one said, when asked “How’s it going?,” “Well, you know… surviving.”

Everyone had a positive and, in some instances, ebullient, air. Certainly, cautious optimism was probably the common display of the conference, but that’s a marked improvement to wandering around like young Werther looking for Albert’s pistol to put an end to his misery. Instead, folks were more of a mind that, perhaps, Lotte would change her mind.

Heck, even Michael Tchong was there! When he reappears on the scene, it’s a good sign that things might just be getting better.

Now, a brief word about the content of the conference. The content was terrific. Now, don’t get me wrong. NO conference in this business has every impressed me with its delivery of information not heard and things on the horizon not seen. Anyone who works on a daily basis in this business would have already come across every idea that was expressed there; some more, some less, certainly, but all the information and data is available to any student of the industry. However, it was still fresh. And by that I mean it was stuff that has come to the fore in the last few months, as opposed to being something that has been beaten into the ground at 5 conferences previous. Basically, you might have actually learned something if you went to any of the sessions being held.

And finally, the people themselves, without whom there would be no conference.

Those in attendance were some of the brightest our industry has to offer. They may not all have hung out for hours on end, shooting the breeze with every walk of life. After all, there are a lot of busy people in this business. But some of the smartest, interesting, and forward-thinking people were gathered in one place, at the same time, and given a chance to talk to one another and exchange ideas. This, ultimately, is what having these kinds of things are all about.

Last month I wrote about the value of conferences and what could be gained in attending them. With @d:Tech this week, what was gained was a renewed sense that, indeed, we are on the right path and we were right to keep working at this thing.

And, yes, the strong do survive.