The annual net.marketing conference and exhibition is happening. It will be held in Miami on May 5 through 7. And, organizers expect to attract 1,000 attendees—about the same as last year.
But those facts have been kept mighty quiet.
No direct mail pieces have gone out to prospective exhibitors or to attendees. And, neither of the co-sponsors’ Web sites advertised the conference.
Marketing was delayed as prices and attributes of New York and Miami locations were considered, said Christina Duffney, spokesperson at the Direct Marketing Association, New York. “We didn’t get the actual location and date until the beginning of December,” she said.
The DMA runs the show with its independent subsidiary the Association for Interactive Marketing.
Unlike net.marketings of the past, this show has been specifically designed to attract upper-level executives, “We want to be relevant to vice presidents and senior vice presidents,” said Jeffrey Handler, director of Internet marketing for the DMA. “We decided on Miami because we thought it would be attractive to people who had the money and authority to attend.”
Promotion for the show is now underway.
A direct mail piece to the 50 or so companies that exhibited last year’s is slated for mailing at the end of January. A mailing to prospective attendees will also drop at the end of the month. “We’d like to get over 1,000 like we did last year,” Handler said.
A Web site www.dmanetmarketing.org goes live next week.
The program has several new features including two “solution labs” created to give attendees one-on-one advice from experts. The Web Site Usability Lab offers Web site critiques and advice on how to improve the customer experience.
The Search Engine Marketing Lab provides individualized assistance on how to improve online visibility.
A pre-conference day, on Monday, May 6, covers Web site usability, e-mail, search engine marketing and affiliate marketing. Forums will be held on each of these topics. The Affiliate Marketing forum features a Meet the Chief Executives roundtable, which includes Jeff Pullen, CEO of Commission Junction and Heidi Messer, president of Linkshare Corp.
A pre-conference day, on Monday, May 6, covers Web site usability, e-mail, search engine marketing and affiliate marketing. Forums will be held on each of these topics. The Affiliate Marketing forum features a Meet the Chief Executives roundtable, which includes Jeff Pullen, CEO of Commission Junction and Heidi Messer, president of Linkshare Corp.
The pre-conference sessions go into so much detail, they “will resemble an MBA course,” Handler said.
Ted Meisel, CEO of search engine Overture will present a keynote luncheon talk on “The Future of Internet Search—The Ultimate Direct Marketing Tool.”
Search engine marketing presentations are offered for the first time. Other new topics for the main conference days are customer service and analytics in e-commerce.
The conference re-tooling follows a couple of troubled years for net.marketing. The show ended abruptly in Seattle in February 2001 when a 7.0 earthquake hit the city. The September 2001 conference, planned for Denver, was cancelled as the economy soured and travel budgets shrank. Then, in December, AIM announced that it was combining its annual show with the net.marketing program to hold one conference per year instead of two.
