We have a moment...only a moment, dear readers. But, enough time to bring you more news from the showroom floor at Ad:Tech NY. Albeit, a POST-show report. We will save the story of our not-so-acceptable room for a later time. In truth, the room wasn't 'un'-acceptable, but -- it could have been better. (no interview this week...but stay tuned, we have some innovative talks coming)

Ad:Tech NY was so exciting! So delightful! So crowded! We felt a bit overwhelmed, and not a little intimidated. For about 5 minutes. Once we met some of the other speakers, we felt more at home. They're just regular folk, dear readers, just like you and me. The men and women we talked with were focused on the Internet, on advertising and marketing, especially email marketing and multi-media. There was a fair amount of 'blog' talk -- but not a lot of qualified information. Jane was surprised at the overwhelming amount of 'same old-same old' marketing going on; most of it aimed at -- you guessed it, that male dominated society of the previous century!

We (Tom and Yvonne) arrived in plenty of time to set-up our presentation on Marketing to Women who shop online. We did our due diligence and prepared a PowerPoint (mostly images, we're not into the slide after slide of stats!) but the power of our presentation was going to be in  the websites and blogs we planned to visit. Alas, the Internet did not co-operate. No access, despite twenty minutes of fiddling. We sensed a bit of frustration coming from the techie helpers -- but, in the end, THEY weren't left with a trashed presentation, now were they? <totally big sigh>

We're becoming used to it. So far, in four presentations we've done, in four different locations -- the Internet has not been live at all. Although, it was requested and promised.

Our presentation was well attended. And fun. We were and are encouraged by the number of interested -- even eager -- faces in the audience intent upon learning more about Jane and her sisters. In hindsight, there was so much more we might have said. And, done -- if only we'd had Internet access. To be honest, there were more Dicks than Janes, none of whom heckled us. (not that we expected such a thing).

The good news is this: the women's market is making it on the radar screens of a lot of small and mid-sized businesses. The big boys -- and they are still mostly boys -- know it's good business to look carefully at the 'women's' market (this is such a BROAD term; pun intended), but they are still mired in stats and research, as opposed to hands on, customer evangelism.

That's what we hope YOU'RE planning, dear reader. Customer evangelism...something we will talk more about as time goes on. One thing we heard over and over at Ad:Tech was that there is a conversation going on, about YOU and YOUR PRODUCTS -- online, via blogs and interactive websites; the question is: Don't you want to know what people are saying? And, when you discover people talking about you, how are you going to respond?

We hope you're going to engage the talkers in a conversation...via a business blog, or via comments left on other blogs. We hope we've given you ample reason to see the power of word of mouth marketing...using the women you know as customer evangelists. [image from our friends in CA, Amore Fashions -- yes, they are clients, but if we can't brag about them, who can?? And, they BLOG!]

With that in mind, we thank Mary Meehan of Iconoculture for her part in the presentation on "The Internet According to Kids and the 21st Century Woman." Mary agreed to be interviewed at a future date.

We also want to thank her co-presenters: Jorian Clarke of Circle 1 Network, and Kathleen Gasperini of Label Networks. All three ladies gave powerful incentives for paying more attention to kids and women. Jane is happy to report that these women have done their homework, we learned a lot of valuable new things from them, especially about the youth market. They 'get' the women's market, sort of. Not completely. At least, not to Jane's standard. But, we'll share those experiences in another post...another day.

Stories to come -- on who we had dinner with, and who we got to talk 'shopping' with, along with more hints on what works, and what doesn't.

What's not to like about that?