Does the ever-expanding sea of ad:tech exhibitors foretell a healthy digital marketing industry?
It does, but maybe not in the way you think. Underscore Marketing’s president explains. Tuesday’s walk through ad:tech New York’s exhibit hall made me feel quite confident. Not in the way it used to, though. It used to be that the size of ad:tech’s exhibit hall directly correlated with the health of the interactive marketing industry. Technically, it still does. Just not in the same way. Meandering from booth to booth, I nodded knowingly at eager vendors, doing my best to convey that I probably wouldn’t be stopping to chat. Most were unfamiliar faces attached to vaguely familiar companies, or companies I’d never heard of. The familiar faces on the floor tended to be people like me who were bewildered by the sheer volume of vendors at the show, who were looking for faces they knew in the crowd and not finding many. Where old friends ran into one another, they formed clumps in the aisles that blocked foot traffic. Their exasperated looks seemed to say, “Thank God you’re here. I was worri
