Ad Tech in Singapore

I left KL yesterday to head to Singapore.I've been sitting on so many airplanes lately I've been getting a bit uncomfortable on planes so I decided that this time I had to take a bus down instead and let me just say it was a refreshing change... though I may go back to taking planes again soon.

The reason why I'm down in Singapore these couple of days is for an event called Ad Tech. To the online advertising industry all over South East Asia, Ad Tech has got to be one of the biggest conferences around.
It's the kind of conference where everyone who's anyone in the advertising industry goes for. If you're not going for the workshops they have there, it is at least worth going to meet all sorts of interesting people there.

The conference covered a lot of topics about online advertising, whether it's measurements or video ads or even whether it's bridging the confidence gap for online advertising.

Yes it's a joke right?

In Malaysia there are said to be 10-12 million internet users and yet... many many advertisers are reluctant to try online ads or even online mainstream ads like MSN and Yahoo let alone something like blog advertising.

Anyway this year's one was a little bit special.

One of the workshops we had was on blogs and... my partner Ming was one of the speakers on the panel discussion they had to the huge crowd of people.

It was truly an honour for Nuffnang to be on such a panel along with Xiaxue and Jeff Ooi.Being the cheeky partner that I was. I kept trying to make Ming nervous before his speech.

I mean this was not only a huge crowd that he was speaking to but it was a crowd that carried a lot of weight. Everyone in the crowd had some kind of influence on his/her organization.

So I kept saying
"WOW.. I counted the seats.. there's like 650 people here!!!"

And his reply was
"F*CK YOU LAH!!! STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME NERVOUS!!!"

So to distract ourselves we took some pictures. One with Jeff and one with Xiaxue.
It was a pretty great talk, although the audience was a little more captivated by another talk we listened to earlier in the morning when a few of the industry leaders, one from an advertising agency and another from Yahoo compared online advertising to sex.

He said something along the lines of
"Online advertising from a marketers point of view is a bit like sex. When you're a teenager you hear everyone talking about sex so you're curious to try it. When you do, you get disappointed the first time.. but the great thing is you keep trying and when you do you get better and begin to enjoy it".That sure woke everyone in the audience up.

Anyway, after Ming finished his speech, I went for a few more workshops and we ended the day late in the evening with this networking session they had for all the industry people.

It's the kind of thing where they just served drinks and everyone met everyone else, exchanging name cards.

I met all sorts of people there... apparently even the owners of Friendster were there and fortunately when I handed by card to anyone I met, the response I got was
"OHHHHhhh.. NUFFNANG... I'VE HEARD SO MUCH ABOUT YOU GUYS!!! YOU GUYS ARE GREAT!!!"

Ahh... being human, sometimes it's just nice to get a leeetle bit of recognition for your work.

Got another full day at the conference tomorrow.