LOS ANGELES — Officials at Imark Communications, new owner of Internet advertising conference @d:Tech, indicated Friday that a decision has been made to have attendance figures at all future @d:Tech events audited by ABC Expomark, which audits other Imark shows.
Joel Davis, general manager of Imark, said the spring @d:Tech conference was not audited because the show's acquisition took place so recently. He insisted, however, that attendance figures at the New York show, scheduled for December, would be audited.
According to Davis, @d:Tech LA attracted 102 exhibitors this year, including 233 fully paid delegates who paid between $1,295 and $1,695 for sessions and exhibit area access, and 2,527 walk-in registrations who paid $50 to go through the exhibit hall. The remaining 1,057 visitors claimed by the firm included exhibitor personnel, speakers and press who did not pay an admission fee. The conference ended Friday.
Davis said the show organizers had captured title, type of business and information about the purchasing responsibility of the walk-in visitors, but he did not indicate whether this list was available for verification by exhibitors or rental by other marketers.
Imark runs a number of technology-related business-to-business trade shows, including ITEC, Broadband Year, Softworld and Projectworld.
Davis, who has been with the @d:Tech show since 1999, blamed the exhibitor cancellations and lower attendance on the aberrational year 2000. He predicted that “we'll see reasonable growth over 1999” for the 2001 events. He added that the firm's future marketing efforts and programming would be geared more toward traditional brick-and-mortar marketers than pure Internet players.
