Great To See Everyone At Affiliate Summit East NYC 2009

Had a great time at Affiliate Summit East. Conference was totally packed with people. Also nice to see a lot of old school friends from the search industry making their way into the performance marketing space. Many of which skipping on SES San Jose (the search industries flagship conference) for the first time in half a decade to attend Affiliate Summit East (they are the same week this year). One of the most interesting things was constantly having people come up to me and tell me how much they love my site (head swells) and how they check it before they buy anything online (now I am confused..... then I figure out they think I am with retailmenot.com who paid over $11,000.00 to charity for me to wear their shirt for the entire conference. I was amazed at hear the stories of how much money people saved by using that site. Very happy to be associates with you retailmenot !! The parties at ASE were incredible. Attendees literally could choose from many amazing social events every night. On Saturday Night Eli from bluehatseo hosted a UFC party in his monstrous suite at the London Hotel. The party was sponsored Sybarite Elite affiliate network (see Bryan I did not forget!). Sunday was the meet market day. John Chow has some great video of the event:

I also did a video with the lovely Michelle Feldman who I bought her shirt for charity for a very very very low cost of three hundred some dollars (incredible investment for all the photos/videos she took). The meet market is a great informal event where all the companies and affiliates get to network. I did not go to last years ASE in Boston but I was there 2 years ago in Miami and holy crap has this thing grown. It was standing room only. I took it easy on Sunday night because I had a 8am meeting the next morning with Random House books about something that might get published yet... but more on that later... I missed the shareasale party and other events but I heard it was awesome. I did goto dinner with good friends at Carmellos sponsored by Blitzlocal and SEOMOZ. Incredible Italian food.... Coming out of the eatery I spotted ELMO taking pictures with people. I knew my 3 year old would shit if she saw me with ElMO so I had to do it: Then I went back to the hotel and to bed. At 10am the show floor opened. This is the 2nd event we had a booth/table for our ShoeMoney Tools and I was ready for it this time. We had a great video playing and I was talking to people about the tools. We learned a lot from our first booth last January on what not to do and this one went much better. Later Monday night after 6 hours on my feet pitching tools from our booth we went retired to change (well I did'nt change cause I was representing retailmenot) then went to the AzoogleAds gathering for a few hours before heading to Del Friscos for dinner. After Del Friscos we were invited by Atrinsic in their VIP bottle service booth to watch Biz Markie at the Touch club in NYC. IMA be honest. If you looked up washed up 1 hit wonder rapper in the dictionary you should see a picture of biz. He sang his 1 song then was like PEACE IM OUT! It was a lot of fun though hanging out with folks where we could actually talk. Great to see the PepperJam network girls in the Atrinsic VIP booth. I also ventured over to the GetAds VIP area to talk to my boy George and team. Sorry if I spilled a drink on anyone.... rumors are I was pretty inebriated. Tuesday was d-day for me. I got up to work our booth and felt like death warmed over. My cold/flu hit me full blast. But I bucked up and pulled down booth duty and closed like I had the GlenGary leads. COFFEES FOR CLOSERS ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!!! After the booth area closed I went back to my hotel and I shit you not I slept from 5pm until I had to leave the next morning. Congrats to Missy and Shawn on an amazing event. See you all in January!