Convergence Diverges

Spent the day at ad:tech in NYC today, a 10-year-old trade show/seminar/expo/human anthill dedicated to the latest trends and technologies in advertising, marketing, and media. I sat in on only two sessions (including the future of media) and prowled the show floor(s)--the number of Search Marketing companies has got to have hit critical mass by now. As I was looking through the show guide and reading about all the sessions held during the three days of the show, not a single mention was made of print. Granted, the focus of the show is "digital media marketing," but one of the big themes is also convergence and multichannel marketing (and print is a channel), and yet the only mention made of print was in a session on e-mail marketing in which e-mail marketers can use postcard mailings to get people to update their e-mail addresses (apparently in one case this reduced the number of bouncebacks from 19% to 1.4%). And even then it wasn't called "print" but rather "offline marketing."

Funny thing, though: in printing industry shows and other commentary, customized, personalized, and variable-data printing is supposedly gaining such huge traction among advertisers and marketers, and yet the premier show dedicated to the advertising and marketing industry had absolutely nothing to say about it. The big topics in the industry now are e-mail marketing, search marketing, and metrics--codifying new ways of measuring ad hits (yep, electronic ads).

There was a ton of info in the Future of Media session and I'll blog about that in the coming days. So consider yourself warned.

For lunch, I had a corned beef sandwich the size of a throw pillow at the Stage Deli. I feel like that python that burst after eating that alligator (which I blogged about a month or so ago).