ad:tech London roundup

Although I only spent a half a day at ad:tech London I managed to cram in quiet a lot. Before I went I wrote a list of the people I wanted to see and what I needed to find out (how organised am I, time management my friend!!). I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the exhibition and quite shocked over the dominance of SEO/SEM companies exhibiting. Literally every other stand was a search company!

I met some of the Big SEO companies, amongst others, the guys from Big Mouth Media, and I must say that it is NO irony they are called Big Mouth, that is so suitably descriptive, just big mouths! Another few words that springs to my mind; condescending, sexist ratbags. They openly took the piss while I was standing there, talking under their breaths and generally being rude. For anyone that is considering applying for a job with them, I would think twice! Actually its a no brainer, dont think, just stay away! Brrrr…

But the big agencies arent all bad. I also stopped by the Greenlight stand and had a chat with Chris Dunn, who was a lovely bloke and could talk for England =) He was telling me about some amazing sounding new PPC tools they are developing, think these guys are on the right track!

I also got the pleasure of meeting Dennis Mortensen from Indextools, a genuinely nice guy with loads of enthusiasm. Im a big fan of Indextools and genuinely think its one of the best analytics packages out there. In fact at SES London this year I grilled the web analytics panel with questions and suggested to the crowd that they should give Indextools a go (and no I dont get paid to say that lol).

My favourite monkey was also exhibiting, ha ha, that sounds well dodgy. Lets start again, my favourite SEO dudes, Rob Kerry (aka Evilgreenmonkey), Mike Nott and Mike Jacobson was exhibiting with their new company Ayima. A pretty sweet looking stand and they were giving away chocolate, now these guys understand women =)

I also attended the Google University (supposedly Advanced) session, jeeese was that a waste of time. If that was the advanced session I wonder what on earth they were saying in the normal session; to turn on your computer, you must plug it in……

After the Google University I visited the Hitwise stand and had a chat with the very lovely Patrick Traynor and he gave me a handy little demo giving me some information about the demographics of Google compared to Yahoo. Did you know there is more woman using Yahoo then Google, it got me thinking about why. Maybe Yahoo has a slightly better appeal to women because of it social media side? What do you think? I also found it quite surprisingly that its more men in the age group 25-35 using Yahoo than Google. And although I am aware that Hitwise data is not set in stone and by no means pure correct data, I still think its interesting =)

After doing my rounds of people I wanted to talk to, it was time to head over to the Crown & Sceptre for our little SEO get together, which was great fun. A pretty good turn out and some thoroughly nice people turned up. It was the usual sweetness of beer, wine and SEO. Cant get much better than that. Although I seem to remember agreeing to marry evilgreenmonkey if he can get a #1 position on Google for “weddings” PubCon Vegas could be interesting, Julie do you want to be a bridesmaid? LOL….Now that would be linkbait even Rand would be proud of (only joking Rand!)….

Here are some photos from the party:

Melissa & Mike Nott from Ayima, Mike you are sooo cute!!