As promised Tobias Siegel, one of Revenue’s top sales reps and conference schmoozer extraordinaire is today’s guest blogger. He’s just returned home to San Francisco from Ad:Tech in the Big Apple armed with swag, stories and battle scars. Here’s his tale.

Live from New York it’s Team Revenue featuring all the performance marketers on Broadway for the 2005 Ad:Tech conference! With over 7,000 advertisers, publishers, affiliates, ad networks, search engines, email and Web analytic solutions in attendance, the Hilton in Times Square was the place to be for two days and nights of schmoozin’, cruisin’ and a bit of boozin’.

Not that we advocate shameless self promotion here at Revenue, but the opening day of Ad:Tech was all about our Publisher, Nick Smith. Or for those who were meeting him for the first time at the show, Nicholai Nickelby Da Clown. Who needs a booth when you’re parading around the show dressed in a costume that includes a purple velvet coat and a crazy hat?

As the opening day conference sessions came to a close we made our down the Red Carpet for the PartnerWeekly kickoff cocktail hour in the Hilton. It’s funny how a couple of cocktails with your friends and partners can ease the exhaustion from working the floor for nine hours straight. We linked up with big wigs like Alex Zhardanosky, CEO of AzoogleAds, John Grosshandler, CEO of eComXpo and Kevin Wolfski of Neverblue Media. Big thanks to Jake Ludens and Robyn Weese at PartnerWeekly for getting the party started.

Next up we took a trip downtown to The “Real Results” Party at the Crobar in Chelsea. The joint was jumping with NYC’s hottest DJ’s serving up the cutz for the late night boogie down. All our favorite celebrities were in the house including the lovely Missy Ward of CPA Empire, Jason Wolfe, CEO of Direct Response Technologies, Jason McClain, CEO of PrimeQ Interactive Advertising and the omnipresent Shawn Collins, founder of the Affiliate Summit. With our VIP passes in hand we mingled with all the partygoers from XY7.com, the BizOpp Network, Vayan Marketing Group, Intermark Media and Ardis Marketing Group.

As party wound down at the Crobar and folks started filtering out to the street there was still a little gas in the tank for Team Revenue and following the fearless lead of our Sales Director, Chris Smith, we hit the late night NYC underground at Club APT in the famous Meat Packing District where we kept the party going with DJ A.Vee and Prince Paul of De La Soul at the controls. We can’t stop and we won’t stop!

After catching a little nap and refreshing back at the Sheraton we made our way back to the conference for Day Two and a chance to meet and greet with our premiere partners such as Rachel Lazar at RealNetworks, Trevor Lakier of Findology, Tom Storm and Bruce Bortle of VentureDirect Worldwide, Ryan Berryman and Ron Sheridan of Revenue.net, Mark Harper of GenieKnows.com and Dan Yomtobian at ABCSearch.com.

The Tuesday night festivities started off with the Affiliate Happy Hour at the Divine Bar. Nick Smith returned to his more familiar role as Revenue’s Publisher and the affiliate gossip was rolling with Beth Kirsch of LowerMyBills.com, Stephanie Schwab of Converseon and Peter
Figueredo, CEO of NETexponent.

Before we could call it a wrap there was one more stop for Team Revenue as we closed out the Ad:Tech festivities at the GRS Poker Party at Club Deep. More celebrities were on hand including Danay Escanaverino and Jonathan Neveloff of Global Resource Systems/Filinet, along with Jason Liester and Nancy Margaret Jones of the AdDrive Advertising Network.

When it was all said and done Team Revenue was beaming with joy from all the great feedback we received at the show. The best personal testimonial I received at the show was from an account manager at iMediaDirect.com who told me he worked as a construction worker for the past 10 years and recently made a career change to the foreign world of Internet performance marketing and advertising. With little knowledge of the industry he picked up a copy of Revenue Magazine and praised our Editor and writers for providing such an invaluable resource for both newbies and industry vets to stay up to speed on the ever changing trends in online performance marketing.

Many thanks to Meredith Medford at Ad:Tech for the continuous support in nurturing the growth of Revenue!

And if you can’t get enough about the happenings at Ad:Tech here are a few sites to check out:
The Ad:Tech Blog
AdRants
ReveNews
Direct Magazine
AdBumb

Let me know about your Ad:Tech experience. t.siegel@revenuetoday.com