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I caught up with Kevin Lee of Did-It.com in the press room at the AD:TECH conference. He was about to give a presentation at a session on search but he squeezed in a little chat with me.

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Reports from AD:TECH 04...

He noted the marked lack of search engine marketing sessions at AD:TECH (something I'd been thinking too). He pointed out that a recent study showed that 40% of media speding goes to search, and about 30 - 35% of the vendors in the exhibit hall were search related (a rough estimate), while only 5% of the sessions (2 of them to be exact) covered search.

Will we see an increase in search sessions in future AD:TECH conferences? Perhaps, though perhaps they're working on a conference that is purely search related?

Overall he said the conference was well attended - the hype is coming back. Nibley of Marsteller said the same thing - the online industry is acting confident again, getting its swagger back.

He also mentioned that the head hunters are back - he was approached by someone asking if he needed any new personnel.

In an interesting bit of conference strategy he suggested that AD:TECH require a fee for the exhibit hall to keep out the tire kickers and junior employees stealing pens (my characterizations there - Kevin referred to them in more professional terms).

It was good to catch up with him - he's an old player in the SEM industry and a regular search engine writer over at clickZ.

Garrett French is the editor of iEntry's eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.