Affiliate Summit West 2010 Recap Part 1: The Show
Well, well. Another Affiliate Summit come and gone. Nickycakes met a LOT of new people at this one, and had a great time hanging out with the friends he already knew from previous shows. This post is part of Nicky’s usual multi-part wrapup and will focus on just the show itself.
Sunday Meet Market
Sunday at Affiliate Summit is soft of the show before the show. The “meet market” is supposed to be like a mini exhibit hall with tables instead of booths. This year there were so many meet market tables, that they had to open a new room for the overflow. This kinda sucks for the people who were forced to get booths in that room, like the Plenty of Fish self serve ads group.
Here is a pic of about 1/3 of the main meet market room:
Affiliate Summit 2010 Meet Market
As you can see, it was pretty packed with people, and a little tough to walk around at times, but overall a good experience as usual. Since the tables in the meet market are less expensive than the larger booths in the main exhibit hall, you get to see a much larger variety of companies.
Here are some more pics from the meet market:
Nickycakes and Scott Richter of Affiliate.com
That pic is apparently a collectors item, because, on average, Scott Richter only smiles in 1 out of 1000 photos taken of him.
Nickycakes with Marisa and AJ from Facebook Ads
Nicky was able to meet up with the W4 network which was formed by some of the former Hydra Network founders. Not sure why, but they seemed really happy to meet him:
Nickycakes and W4 Network
Shawn Collins found Nicky in the meet market at some point to give him a custom Nickycakes ninja poken:
Nickycakes Ninja Poken
And finally this one:
Nickycakes and Ryan Eagle, 2 out of 3 of the whitest people on the planet (harrison wasn't there)
Monday Keynote
Monday is when the main part of the show starts. It is kicked off by the main keynote which, honestly, in years past at Affiliate Summit, has been AWFUL. Let’s take a look at who they’ve had in the past:
- ASE 2009 – Chris Brogan LOL SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT
- ASW 2009 – Gary Vaynerchuk – Nicky would rather stab his eyes out with lobster forks than listen to this idiot babble on about himself again.
- ASE 2008 – Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ – uhhhh…can we say irrelevant?
- ASW 2009 – Jason Calacanis – King Douchebag and creator of Mahalo, the worst excuse for a search engine/wikipedia knockoff ever created.
Hopefully you get the picture. The past keynotes have been bad. This year, however, Nickycakes was excited to hear that Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, one of the best books ever written for anyone selling anything online (as in, you’re a complete failure if you haven’t read it,) was the keynote speaker.
Dr. Robert Cialdini Keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2010
Nickycakes showed up a few minutes late, sadly, since the keynote is in the morning, and Nicky isn’t quite accustomed to getting up earlier than the crack of noon, especially after staying out late playing craps with the guys the night before, but he didn’t miss much. Dr. Cialdini drove home many points from his book with really good examples and studies, and really helped relate them to online marketing. If you were paying attention to his keynote, you will have gotten tips that will prove invaluable to your marketing campaigns.
After the keynote everyone was given a wallet-sized card with the 6 principles of influence outlined for everyone to use when they need to influence anyone, be it online via a marketing campaign or on the phone with a potential client:
Six Principles of Influence Card from Robert Cialdini
REALLY awesome keynote this year. More like this please!
Monday Exhibit Hall
If you’ve been to one ASW exhibit hall, you’ve been to all of them. There are big booths set up by the networks, agencies, merchants, whatever, and you walk around, chat it up with potential new contacts, get free crap that you’ll never use like pens, t-shirts, stress relief balls, and whatever else they have in the generic marketing product catalog that you can slap your logo on for a dollar a pop and give to everyone who walks by. Some booths are cool, some suck. It’s easy to tell which networks “get it” when it comes to appealing to affiliates, and which networks are suit-wearing morons who have no idea what their pubs are looking for in a network.
Guess which two networks had all the high-volume pubs hanging out at their booths..again this year?
Convert2Media – Pretty simple booth: a bar, barstools, a keg, and a guy serving free beers.
Nickycakes at the C2M Booth With Mike, Ruck, and Nick Mattern
Ads4Dough – A giant wrap-around couch to provide maximum sitting room for anyone who wanted to stop by. And it was comfortable.
Smaxor at the Ads4Dough Booth
What did the booths have in common? Both were networks that were started by affiliates, so they pretty much know what affiliates want. Employees at both were dressed casual, were approachable and friendly, and showed potential new pubs how their experience would be working with the network.
The majority of the rest of the booths were the opposite. Here’s what you DON’T want to have at your booth if you’re a network looking to attract good pubs who actually make money:
- Suits
- Nowhere for people to sit
- Booth filled with excessive signage that gets in the way
- A giant mascot (wtf are you thinking)
- Business card fishbowl drawing for an ipod
- The same tired network pitch: “we have the best exclusive offers, best AM’s, best payouts, etc.” Heard it. Never true.
Get a clue people. Affiliates come to conferences mostly to talk to other affiliates. If your booth is some high tables with some uncomfortable high stool chairs, some business cards, a former used car salesman in a crappy suit trying to tell you about how exclusive their offers are, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.
Some other pics from around the exhibit hall floor:
Nickycakes and Shane Dollas. Yes, he exists.
Nickycakes and Eleah at the AKMG skateboard booth
Oh, ok, so after looking through his photos, Nickycakes found some classics. Many who read this blog will know that Nickycakes repeatedly talks about how clueless Marketleverage is with their show efforts. This year they smartly abandoned the “cashinator” retarded swirling $1 bill machine which no wealthy affiliate would ever humiliate themselves inside grabbing for cash like a moron. In its place, they decided to order like 100 In-n-Out burger meals and hand them out for free at lunch at their booth. Ok, so there are a couple reasons this is funny. First, their booth was directly next to the lunch area, where the lunches cost Affiliate Summit a pretty big chunk of change, and there were tons of people eating fast food, which is only a couple bucks, instead of the expensive show food. Second, all these people dressed up in suits were practically fighting to get a $5 fast food meal. They were all lined up on the edge of the showroom eating standing up in their suits. Hilarious. Here’s a pic of people getting way too excited about a burger.
There were a lot more pics with bigger crowds but this girl probably had the best face. To be fair, in-n-out is the best burger in the world.
Tuesday Awards and Keynote
Tuesday morning started out with some breakfast in the food party of the conference, which was actually really good. Nicky thought nobody he knew would actually be up at the ungodly hour of 9:30am, and he was mostly right, but he was able to find Andrew Wee and Eric Nagel, and was eventually joined by this lady Loxly and some other dude.
After breakfast was the Pinnacle Awards and as you probably already know, Nicky won the Pinnacle Award for Affiliate of the Year.
After the Pinnacle Awards presentation was a keynote by Copyblogger, Brian Clark. It was Brian’s first time giving a keynote speech, but he was actually a decent public speaker. Unfortunately the content was fairly scatterbrained, and although he played some clips from Girl Talk, it was hard to follow his point. Some of his best remarks were repeated points from the previous days keynote.
Brian Clark Keynote Affiliate Summit West 2010
Tuesday Exhibit Hall
After the copious amounts of partying the night before (covered in the next part of the wrapup,) everyone was pretty much dead tired if they even showed up at all. Nicky spent most of the time posted up on the sofa in the A4D booth chatting with whoever came around and sat down. Here are some pics from tuesday:
Nickycakes and Nick Mattern
relaxin at the a4d booth
C2M Steve w/ Louis Loafers and the Bentley Breitling
Nickycakes with Shawn Collins and Missy Ward
What About the Sessions?
Nickycakes didn’t go to any. He was gonna go to Josh’s SEO one but forgot about it. The Facebook one was only good cause Shoemoney was gonna be in there starting drama with Dennis Yu, and many people actually bought platinum passes to see that, and many more would have bought platinum passes if it were allowed to go on, but didn’t.
That’s it for the show.
Nickycakes went home around 4pm on tuesday and fell asleep. Next post will be about the parties.
Keep it real.
Is this the book you’re referring:
removed your affiliate link. nice try tho
busted!
Good Stuff Nicky. One of the best recaps of ASW ’10
Dr. Robert Cialdini live … danmm only that woth a lot
.. booth booth .. where are the party pictures 
party pictures in the next post
show…parties…drama
Bummed I missed Cialdini…dam booth duty. Love the pics, especially the fedora force….
Some really good points about how affiliate networks need to setup their booths. I went to Ad:tech San Fran last year and I remember how tired my legs were. It really makes sense for booths to have couches. This will definitely be something I suggest we implement at our next show
uggggh, another reminder that i freakin missed Cialdini ::hand meeting forehead::
it’s cool. i has the book.
Haha can’t wait for the next post.
I just got hip to your blog nickycakes and I am already hooked in. The way you bust out people cracks me up. Get recap btw, seem like you had a blast and con grad’s on your big win.
Glad I actually got my hungover ass up and off to that keynote. Definitely worth it and a credit to Shawn Collins’ ability to pull someone that’s worth listening to.
Wow, thorough write up. Thanks!
Awesome recap.. can’t wait for the next one
Hey Nicky,
How funny, was reading the recap on Affiliate Summit West, and lo and behold there was a pic of me in the Exhibit Hall….I was hoping to run into you to tell you that your “Newbie Guide” was great and how much I appreciated it; but, I never saw you. Yet, at one point, you were behind me. How funny! Any way, great post on ASW.
You make it sound like it wasn’t worth the money. Is that your opinion of the show outside of the few positive things you had to say? Just curious.
I don’t swing from everyones nuts for free stuff like most crappy bloggers. I post the good with the bad.
That said, affiliate summit is likely the best investment you can make as an affiliate. The sessions and keynotes usually suck, but you will learn stuff from other affiliates that is worth 100x the price you paid to go.
Thanks for writing this up, the next one will probably rock as well.. if they only offered thai food instead of burgers right nicky?
caldini…. good italian boy