Visiting ad:tech India

The first week of March my colleague Philip Keckeis and I went on a business trip to India to attend the ad:tech conference which was held on March 3rd and 4th in New Delhi, India. The main reason of this trip for TradeTracker, was to intensify and expand our active merchant and affiliate relationships in this region. ad:tech is a global conference and exhibition which focuses on online marketing & advertising technology. Next to the event in New Delhi, there are events which are held in New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, Sydney and Auckland (New Zeeland) throughout the year.

Getting adjusted

After an 8 hours direct flight from Amsterdam, we arrived in the middle of the night at the Indira Gandhi airport near New Delhi. The taxi would normally bring us to the hotel in about 20 minutes, which should have been fine. The driver was convinced to know where the exact location of the hotel was, but unfortunately, this was not the case. Also the fact that we had to stop for several times on the side of the highway didn’t help to get us to the hotel in a fast way. The car seemed to have some motor issues what caused that the motor stalled and we had to stop at the side of the road. After “fixing” the car, we finally reached the hotel after about approximately 80 minutes.

After a short night of sleep, we had appointments planned with publishers and merchants for this day, one day before the start of the ad:tech event. We booked a taxi to drive us around for the day, this time a much better one than the night before. But, when you haven’t visited India before, and New Delhi in particular, then you should know that the traffic is almost a professional sport in India. Next to the fact that there are traffic jams all over the day, people are driving like their life depends on it. There also seem to be no rules in the traffic, other than who is first, will have the (slight) advantage of priority from the other road user. A two – or three lane road can easily turn into a six lane road. Well, enough mentioned about the traffic. After a good day with meetings we made it back to the hotel, where we prepared ourselves for the ad:tech event the next day.

Attending the ad:tech event

The next two days we attended the ad:tech event where we have spoken with some interesting companies. Publishers, merchants, media companies, tech companies and many more. Next to the sessions with keynote speakers and panel discussions, there was a large exposition floor divided over two areas with over 75 exhibitors. As we have seen on other events as well, more and more companies have recently started their business and developed solutions for mobile advertising, in-app advertising, solutions for automated ad trading and solutions for video advertising. Despite this automation trend, we have noticed that there is also still a large need for non-automated ad trading as well. The human touch in online advertising still has an enormous value; luckily this is our daily business here at TradeTracker, servicing publishers and merchants with performance marketing in 19 countries and surely more to come!

Photo credits: ad:tech

I can say we had a successful visit to India, meeting a lot of potential publishers, merchants, agencies and more. I am already looking forward to the next business trip and will update you again here on the TradeTracker blog!

Michiel Jelgerhuis Swildens
International Business Development Manager
TradeTracker.com