Ad:Tech San Fran 2009 Wrapup

27 April

by nickycakes

It’s been a few days since Nickycakes got back from Ad:Tech, and no doubt you’ve already seen the videos of some of the stuff that went down at the Nickycakes.com/PPC.bz party. But what happened at the event itself?

Day 0 (monday):

As many of you know, Nickycakes loves flying Virgin America. They have neat stuff like in-flight wifi and cheap upgrades to first class. Nicky got on his flight and sat down right next to Dave Vankomen from Vankomen Media (same dudes who flew nicky and his friend to utah last month for a jazz game). What are the odds? Pretty uneventful flight to SFO, at which point Dave was nice enough to hook Nicky up with a ride to the hotel in one of those private cars where they stand with your name on a sign at the baggage claim. Ballinnnn.

Cakes got to the Intercontinental hotel and checked in. The thing is, there are two Intercontinental hotels in SF. One is right next to the convention center, and one is on the top of Nob Hill. If you checked into the one at Nob Hill, you were pretty far from the conference, but still staying in a really nice hotel. Anyway, here are a couple pics of the room. Not too bad considering this was like one of their least expensive ones:

After that it was pretty much dinnertime so Nicky went to his favorite sushi place in the world, Sushi Rika. Sushi Rika is a little hole-in-the-wall sushi place in Nob Hill real close to the Mark Hopkins. They barely speak english there and you see lots of actual Japanese people eating there, which generally is a good indication of the quality. Anyway, they have all the normal sushi rolls, but also have a bunch of really awesome creative ones. Nickycakes’ favorite is this tuna roll thats got mango and rasberry sauce on the side. It sounds crazy but its sooooo good. There were a few people on twitter that sent Cakes a reply saying they tried the place out as well and loved it, so hit it up next time you’re in town.

Day 1 (tues):

Tuesday was the first day of the actual conference. Nicky got up early(ish) in hopes of making the opening keynote [fail] and ended up going to get breakfast with Jason and Alonzo from ads4dough, and Charles aka Dr Ngo. Uberaffiliate was supposed to come down for breakfast too, but then realized that he booked at the wrong Intercontinental hotel and was like 2 miles away [fail].

The crew was greeted with some really fun lines to stand in:

Nicky was able to cut in line with Justin Chelf and get to the front only to find out that since he had a press pass, he just had to go up to the 3rd floor press room and pick it up without waiting in any lines. With that taken care of, it was time to go walk around the exhibit hall. Here are some pics from that:

With neverblue

random exhibit hall aisle

ngo

Dr_Ngo gettin Ric Flair all over some Force Factor.

For lunch, Nicky got a bunch of friends together to go eat at the W. Somehow they were able to pack everyone into a table on short notice.

Several mil a month in revenue at that table, easy.

For dinner that night, Nickycakes had his traditional dinner with Brit from CPAE. Obligatory nick + brit pic:

mailgooglecom

Tuesday Night:

Ok, so you’ve seen the vids from the Nickycakes.com / PPC.bz party. Here are a few more pics to go with them:

The party was awesome. Thanks to everyone who came out.

Day 2 (wednesday):

Much less exciting than day 1 for sure. Walked around the exhibit hall mostly, chatted with friends, etc.

Actually, day 2 is when the best part of the conference happened. Nickycakes was standing around chatting with Uberaffiliate and Shoemoney, and these 3 girls from some random new network walked up, turned to Uber, and said “Hey, are you Nickycakes?!” The look on his face was priceless. Poor guy. Here are some pics from Wednesday:

With Ruck from Convert2Media

Jonathan Volk, Cakes, Uberaffiliate

Oh, forgot to mention one small detail. They did a drawing for a 40″ 1080p HDTV at the CX Digital booth and Cakes ended up winning. Instead of keeping it though, he’s gonna have a contest and give it away to somebody on the blog. Stay tuned for that. Here’s a pic of said TV behind Nicky and 3 of his friends from CX: