VTB goes to NYC for SES Conference

An opportunity of a lifetime struck Vintage Tub interns this week when the General Manager, Allan Dick, Jr., invited us to attend the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference and Expo at the Hilton in New York City. We woke up at 5 am on March 18th like little kids on Christmas morning to start our travel into the city for a full day of fun.

Defining Fun:

• Listening to presentations and panel discussions that cover literally all aspects of search engine-related promotion.
• Choosing between 16 different sessions all in one day, ranging from Introduction to Search Engine Marketing, Universal Search to Optimization, Analytics and Paid Search.
• Having the sessions presented by the industry's top Search experts and representatives of the Search Engines themselves, just to name a few:
• Google, Acronym Media, Microsoft, bigmouthmedia, Hitwise, IBM, Medio, and comScore.

• Learning the most innovative and current technology that even advanced search marketers were not unaware of until this week.
• Meeting and networking with people of similar interests in ecommerce.
  
• Visiting the 100’s of expo booths to stock up on pens and sticky notes.
• Searching booths for better gifts like Steak Media's purple cow, Acronym Media's hand sanitizer for “hands-on search” and delicious baked cookies from Omniture.

Although the 7 of us are all SEMPO Certified, we were still impressed by the amount of new info we learned in just one day and can only imagine being there for 4 days. I also noticed something about the environment we were in; we were the youngest people there. There were plenty of young business men and women, but they were clearly employees of their business, not college students. There were very few interns here because employers would rather invest their money for a "platinum pass" in their employees before interns (let alone seven!). I’m sure I can speak for the rest of the interns when I say that it made us all appreciate the trip that much more.

At 6 pm, when the conference sessions were complete, our day was far from finished. Leaving the Hilton, we relocated to the Manhattan Penthouse where our manager threw a networking dinner party with over 120 guests from the conference and industry. As if the day couldn’t get better, I was able to speak one on one with reps from SEMPO, 360i, ESPN, Microsoft, Google and many more, which deserves greater depth in a later post. With all this, a career experience of a life time was created.

Thank you to everyone (especially Allan, Mike and Regina) who made this day possible for us. One for the books.