It’s Thursday morning on the second day of the AAAA’s media conference here and the early buzz is that the show is drawing a good turn out despite a lackluster agenda. But unlike years past, few
big names are in two -- P&G CMO
Jim Stengel, who deliver’s this morning’s keynote, being the biggest one. Even among the attendees, few big names were spotted during last
night’s opening reception. We saw
MPG’s Steve Lanzano, Initiative’s Richard Beaven and Alan Cohen, Optimedia’s Antony Young, and even conference chair and GroupM North America
boss
Marc Goldstein fleeting around, but most of the crowd was comprised of lower level, and smaller regional agency folk. And lots and lots of vendor types, but other than
Dave Cassaro and his crew from Comcast Networks, we didn’t even see a lot of Big Media types. Another, arguably more superficial indication that this year’s media conference is
a bit more tepid than in year’s past, was the pitiful display of “room drop†materials we spotted outside out door this morning. There was zero scwhag in sight, unless you include a door tag
from the Arbitron folks inviting you to a drawing for Visa gift cards, and one from Spiceworks to win tickets to the Austin City Limits Music Festival. No chocolate bars from AOL. No coffee mugs from
Yahoo. Plenty of free-be copies of industry trade publications, though two of those were a confusing sight. The marketing team at BBC America somehow managed to buy the covers of competing
broadcast trades
B&C and
TelevisionWeek for its new show “Robin Hood: The Series.†The effect was that both the Crain and the Reed pub looked like twin ads for a TV supplier.
