Conference Roundup: Affiliate Summit East 2007

Miami has all the characteristics of a good convention town. It has an incredible amount of hotels, multiple convention centers, top notch dining, international accessibility, and generally good weather. It also has plenty of nightlife – clubs, bars, and those other types of bars so popular with conference going crowds, particularly men. Despite its many offerings, Miami doesn’t feel like a convention town. It feels raw, lawless, and lacking any true sophistication. It has haute couture but not on the surface haute culture. All of the same certainly holds true for another major convention town, Vegas. Its indulgences and excesses come to mind first, much of which makes it such a fun place to go for a convention. Sin aside, Vegas also offers the hotels, convention space, dining, accessibility, etc. necessary for a good convention city, and like Miami it has conferences and conference visitors cycling through it almost non-stop. One of these conferences calls home to both, Affiliate Summit, the de facto convention for the affiliate marketing industry. In January of this year, Affiliate Summit called Vegas home. This past week, it was Miami’s turn. As we did in January, we do now, providing our take on one of the harder to describe but seemingly most fun shows.

Hotel
Upon walking into the InterContinental, I felt like I arrived at the wrong show. For those like me trying to forget having had to stay at the Bally’s during Affiliate Summit West, I kicked myself for booking a more expensive hotel room elsewhere. Most people heading to Miami won’t stay at the InterContinental. It’s one of the newer hotels in the core of Downtown, but it’s in Downtown. You’ll get a nice room for a good rate, but good luck if you want easy access to anything other than the hotel’s pool. The mind boggling, Vegas level of construction near by, might have you think otherwise, but unless you really like the Miami Heat, you’ll buy your overpriced condo and wake up to a view of loading docks and easy access to Ross. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Missy and Shawn could have held the conference in a beach front hotel in Miami Beach. It would have cost more and offered less; we would have saved on cab fares, which seemed to always end up between $19 and $25 no matter where you went, but the conference would not have gone as well. As our friend Jon from Wicked Fire remarked, "There’s no gambling." In other words, we had no choice but to focus on the conference at hand. It’s not like Vegas where, for better or worse, you can’t escape the sounds of the slot machines or take a quick left and accidentally find yourself at a card table. Having the show at the beach would have had the same effect. It would have been all to easy to spend your day at the beach.

Weather
My feeling of having arrived at the wrong location didn’t begin with the hotel. It began the second I stepped out of the plane and onto the jetway. The ever wonderful flight attendant said we landed at Miami, but it felt like hades. Walking outside, walking anywhere, just standing outside felt like someone playing a practical joke with one of those water misters; instead of a fine cool mist, the air seemed to provide a dankness made up of water from a used mop, a mop used to wash off a caravan of camels and their smelly riders after a bat guano excavation in the hundred plus degree heat. OK, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but all of the sudden the 30 degree winter chill or Vegas doesn’t seem that bad. It’s a dry cold at least.

Conference Area
Despite the Bally’s decrepit appearance, it made for an incredibly efficient, if not slightly supersized, conference area. The walls of the building and the horribly unattractive carpet on the other do its best to detract from the effectiveness of the geometric space. The feng shui of the InterContinental on the other hand made for a more than pleasant space in which to roam, but roam you had to do. I’m not sure if the mezzanine of the InterContinental, home to exhibit hall, had a name, but it might as well have been The Serengeti, as "roam" was the appropriate word. If only we could take a quick poll and see how many people actually made it to Silver Carrot’s booth. It, though, had a nickname, the end of the world. I suspect, though, this had more to do with unexpectedly high demand as opposed to poor planning or an inadequate venue. Thus, despite certain companies less than ideal placement, navigation was not difficult, and the area had a museum like feel, inviting attendees to leisurely stroll rather than rush through it like checking off items on a treasure hunt.

People
Yet again, that which makes Affiliate Summit a 1+1=3 event comes down to those in attendance. Perhaps my biggest surprise was just how international the show has become. I expected one out of every three people to have a Florida connection, but that just didn’t seem to be the case. I thought, if anything, this show would turn out to be the real incarnation of MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, but instead of feeling like a local show, or one sided, it felt the most polished and international of any to date. As we wrote during our review of the Vegas show, "You don’t go because you feel you have to. You go because you want to. You go without many expectations but a belief that something will come of it. And, you find yourself proven right." It was true then, and it holds true now. Well done everyone.