• by Paul Gough , November 3, 2003

It's showtime.

Ad:Tech's three-day conference kicked off today in midtown Manhattan. This morning's events featured a keynote by Nancy Friedman, vice president of advertising at Visa USA. It also featured panel discussions on integrated marketing and advertainment, which both reach far beyond the traditional definitions of the Web. Plus there were panels on how to increase response rates with e-mail marketing and a discussion of media-mix modeling featuring Mediasmith's Dave Smith and analyst Erwin Ephron. Tonight features the seventh annual Ad:Tech Awards Ceremony and reception.

Tuesday's highlights include an outlook for interactive advertising with Michael Tchong of Trendsetters and eMarketer's Geoff Ramsey, who looked into his crystal ball at September's Forecast 2004 sponsored by MediaPost; how to track clicks and conversions and a look at how technology will impact branding in the future.

And on Wednesday, the last day of the show, the morning keynote will focus on search-based advertising's role in the resurgence of interactive advertising and whether or not search has a bright future. Ad:Tech will also look at whether pop-up ads will keep popping up (or whether they will go the way of telemarketing phone calls), what's up in the broadband broadcast space and more about integrated marketing.

--Paul J. Gough