ASW 09 Wrapup Post Part 1 of 3: The Show
First, Nickycakes would like to say that he was absolutely humbled by the number of people who came up and thanked him for providing a useful resource for new and experienced affiliates. That is the ultimate goal of this site, and is really the best payment for this job…well..other than the buckets of referral commissions of course. It was really awesome meeting everyone, and this was, by far, the best Affiliate Summit that the Cakes has had the opportunity to attend. Another big thanks for everyone who showed up to Nickycakes’ session. It was great to see so many people awake at noon in vegas. Cheers.
Ok, so the wrapup post will have to be broken into 3 parts just because there is sooo much stuff to cover. The first of the 3 parts will cover the show itself. It’s important to separate the show from the rest of the conference this year because so many crazy ass things went down, and the affiliate summit staff may not want everything directly associated with them. And, to be fair, it is vegas after all…so crazy stuff is bound to happen. So after reading this post, stay tuned for the other installments which will contain parties and drama galore.
Day 0: Saturday
Nicky didn’t end up getting into vegas until late Saturday evening, which felt like even later due to the time zone difference, so he ended up just crashing and missing the Wickedfire Meetup on Saturday night. Apparently it was good times tho, and many pictures were taken. There were also the exclusive wickedfire T-Shirts given out which Nickycakes was proud to have designed the back of. Ruck, cakes’ good pal and owner of Convert2Media footed the bill for the shirts and had the shirt order rejected by two separate printing companies due to the dickroll url on the front. Awesome.
Day 1: Sunday
Arriving at the Rio about 20 minutes before his panel, Nickycakes went down to the conference center to find a long ass line at the registration tables for people trying to get their passes. He decided that half an hour was too long to wait, so he just walked to the front of the line, found an open computer, filled in his registration info, got his pass, and went on in. Good game.
The panel Nickycakes was speaking on was at noon on Sunday. It was the first session of the conference…why not open with a bang, rite? The panel was supposed to be about Affiliate Marketing…lead generation strategies, whatever. Andrew Wee was the panel moderator, and Nickycakes, Geordie Carswell, and Miles Baker were the panelists. Geordie is another ppc guy, and Miles does SEO. Andrew….attends conferences and has a blog…as well as plays some facebook games from time to time. The way Andrew set it up was..he would ask questions of the panelists, and then they would answer citing their experience in their fields. The questions were pretty basic, and didn’t really have much depth to them, so it was hard to go into much detail. The weird thing was, after the panelists answered, andrew would go off on some tangent about blogging which didnt really relate much to what we were talking about…but i guess that just everyone on the panel a chance to drink some water.
As the thing was filling up, Nicky was able to take a couple pics prior to everything getting started. Most of the room ended up pretty full of people with a few standing in the back (click to enlarge):
And a few pics of the session in progress:
In all honesty, the thing went pretty well. The place ended up pretty full as people were able to get their passes and wake up from partying the night before. There were some decent questions asked, and good answers, and there were also some pretty awful questions asked as well. Overall, not a bad first professional speaking gig for the Cakes. More to come hopefully.
Destone (seen sitting in the front row to the left with red hair in the panorama pic) was met with utter failure when he tried to rickroll the entire room at the end using…..an iphone… Cakes couldn’t even hear it and he was sitting 5 feet away and the room was silent expecting him to ask a question. Stay classy Craig.
After that, there were more sessions, but the Cakes went to the Meet Market, which is just a giant room with tables set up for a bunch of companies, networks, whatever, and you can go around and talk to everyone. Kinda like a more casual version of the main exhibit hall which starts on monday. One of the fun parts of the meet market was the booth that Facebook had set up. Facebook decided they wanted to come to ASW to see first hand exactly how much everyone hated their ad approval team, and the resounding answer was: a metric fuckton. One of the guys at the booth even held up a video camera and recorded Cakes going on a rant about how he’d love to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on facebook traffic if they would let him, but since they wont, that money is now going to other people, like myspace and google.
Day 2: Monday
Monday is when the exhibit hall opens and you get to go see all the real big booths. Nickycakes was up early and decided to try the continental breakfast at the conference. It consisted of cereal, pastries, and fruit, and there was orange juice and some other stuff to drink as well. Not exactly the giant omlette that would have been ideal for a starving affiliate, but it was enough. Nicky then headed over a little late to the Gary Vaynerchuk keynote. Apparently this guys claim to fame is that he hosts some wine show on tv and has some related website. Well, he was a good public speaker, but the keynote was devoid of any real decent information that could be used towards affiliate marketing, unless you spend your days endlessly trolling digital point and joel comm’s blog. Probably the only useful thing he talked about was like…don’t reply to too many people on twitter cause it’s annoying.. The Q+A session that followed was all just people trying to get voice time on the mic to promote their shitty websites, so Nicky rolled out early to avoid bothering everyone with his snoring from the back row.
After the disappointing keynote, most everyone headed over to the exhibit hall, where all the still-half-drunk affiliate managers were struggling to finish setting up their booths and choke down some alka-seltzer in time for the crowds to show up. As far as the show itself is concerned, the exhibit hall is where it’s at for affiliates. Not necessarily because all the networks are there, but because the other affiliates are there and you get to go hang out with them and talk shop a little. You can’t really talk shop at the parties at night cause most people are sloshed and don’t feel like talking about work that much, but in the day, everyone wants to talk some business.
Now a little bit about booths. If you’re an affiliate network, you might want to pay attention to this one if you want to attract any affiliates to your booth. Put yourself in the shoes of an affiliate walking around the ASW exhibit hall. Almost every network is trying to get you to come over and chat so they can tell you about their “most exclusive offers”, “best payouts”, and “best affiliate managers” or whatever. EVERYONE. It gets boring having every booth trying to sell you something. That’s why most affiliates just walk around and talk to other affiliates…it’s much more productive. So…your goal is to attract affiliates to your booth. What do affiliates want? Do they want some flatscreen displays with a signup form to your network? Do they want a variety of free pens with your network name written on them? Or maybe some anti-stress foam things? NO. Let’s take a look at some good and bad booths.
Here’s the bad..this is a double booth during a really busy time when tons of affiliates and other people are jam packed in the exhibit hall. You can almost hear the crickets. The logo has been removed since this company seems to be [allegedly] rather trigger happy with the legal documents.
Really? Two chairs and a glass table? Do you honestly thing this is going to bring you more business?
One booth actually hired a freakin magician…well you could really just call him a 5yr old birthday party type clown except with no makeup and a suit on…
Ok, lets take a look at some booths that actually attracted affiliates:
Jason from Ads4Dough was pretty much spot on with what affiliates want in a show booth. He just got a decent sized flatscreen, nintendo wii, and a big ass wrap around sofa. The thing was packed the whole show. There were like at least 1mil a month in revenue worth of affiliates on that sofa like the whole show.
And then there was the booth that had the foosball table. People were all over that one:
No pics available of it for some reason, but copeac had a keg and a sofa at their booth which was a pretty good draw as well.
Day 3: Tuesday
With monday being the big day, tuesday is more of the same as monday, except things are kinda winding down. Especially since there are so many parties monday night, and pretty much all the attendees and exhibitors are hung over, it’s a pretty slow day. As none of the networks who took pics with me have responded to nickycakes’ requests for said photos, here is the obligatory pic of nicky with his favorite cx digital affiliate manager…
Whenever network people get off their collective asses and send me more, they will be posted.
update pics:
That’s it for the official conference stuff…more to come on parties in the next post.
Keep it real.
Kaveman your beard is out of control.
this show looks completely insane, or absurd, i don’t know..
awesome write up and i love the booth with the 2 chairs and glass table.
I couldn’t agree more with your statement about Andrew Wee..he just kept going on about blogging after every question. It was still a nice session.
it was a great start to kick off with your panel. came in a bit late and it was already crowded!
I got so many pictures of this affiliate summit.. no idea why. Some pretty good/funny ones in the bunch (at airport will upload later!)
Justin Chelf
I didnt make the panel but if I had, it would have been the only one I would have attended. I’ll catch it on video later hopefully.
Yeah, you were spot on with your post on WF about the uselessness of the sessions. The only thing that came out of them was being able to network a bit with the speakers.
Everytime I saw you around the conference you were mobbed so I didn’t really get a chance to talk shit much in person.
Being noob status I didn’t get to schmooze enough. Oh well, good introduction to social side of the biz.
not what i expected you to look like.
At first I couldnt decide if I liked you or not.
I dont like that you talk in third person and you do seem to have a fascination with dick. You also use a picture of yourself in your logo that makes you look wild and crazy and even maybe as tough as you talk. BUt now seeing a real photo I don’t buy that anymore.
That all being said, I think I do like you.
You speak the truth and are honest in your posts, something that is missing especially in Affiliate Marketing.
I’ll be following from now on.
sup nicky! Ill have to catch your panel on the AS site…once I fully recover after many a night of debauchery. This was definitely an event not to be missed…but I’m glad it’s over. 4 days in Vegas is more than enough.
That looks real fun! I want to go someday dammit!
Nice write up, bro. haha @ the two chairs and a glass table, with the [alleged] edit.
PS – Looks like someone “likes you,” judging by your comments. Must be a man crush?
Cakes:
Great post. I definitely appreciate the shit talking. You should rant more about Andrew and the other shitty networks. There must have been more at the show, right?
Got stuck in the disneyland of a lineup to register, so only caught the last 25 minutes or so. Anyways, nice to catch what I could of the cakes in speaking action.
wait…dont you hate shoemoney? did you smack him around at all? what do you do when you see the people you bash all the time? act like nothing happened?
What clown still tries to Rick Roll people? That is so 2007.
Congrats on the speaking appearance dude. On a related note, any chance of me meeting you in person at SMX West?
@m.berman: ive never bashed shoemoney that bad except for like…black dildo photoshops.. also, i’m friendly with anyone i meet in person. if people want to get mad over the internet, they’re retards
@gab: smx looks gay, so probably not.
Listen here nickycakes, its a damn screenshot and also linked back to your post , quit your crying , I can put w.e I want on my blog that I find funny etc, It is clearly not typed out word for word and plagerized
Cakes, your appearance really shows in a subtle way the brilliant brain you have. Keep it going, and realize how much you have been of help to many people like me.
LOL affiliate summits are the BOMB