Before I head off on my adventure to the far East, I wanted to post a few photos of our little guy. There’s this book – Something Queer is Going on at the Ballpark – that he just loves. It involves these two elementary school girls, one who is an amateur detective (see SQIGOATCafeteria, as well as others) and the other, in this case, is on the baseball team. Someone steals her lucky bat and glove, and hijinx ensue. Well, Sam got tired of his wrapping-paper-roll-bat and a wad of tinfoil, so we picked up a t-ball set and some extra whiffle balls at Target. He loves it!
Since getting Sam down for a nap has become a challenge lately, we’ve resorted to bribery. Sidewalk chalk, seen above, is one example. He loves to spend time on the front sidewalk scribbling, playing tic-tac-toe with us and just hanging out.
This year’s Admonsters excursion (to conference #17 to be exact) took me out to the environs of Albequerque and Santa Fe at the Hyatt Tamaya resort in Bernalillo, New Mexico. We decided to make this a family affair since very soon Amy will be on a no-travel regimen (due date is October 31, only 10 weeks away). Amy’s parents also joined us for a bit of R&R&Sam. To top that all off, Amy’s aunt (who is from Albequerque) and uncle came down from Denver – and their son Jonathan came out from LA. So all in all it turned into a little Handelman/Siegel/Gardenswartz reunion.
We had a great dinner with Bobbi’s 90-year-old father and the rest of the clan on Friday night, headed up to Santa Fe on Saturday along with 100,000 of our closest friends for the annual Indian Market and Art Show. It was a madhouse, but a great way to see the full scope of what the area’s artistans have to offer. One celebrity spotting, Curtis Stone of TLC’s Take Home Chef. Despite rumors of both Oprah and Dennis Hopper being seen around our hotel, neither was confirmed.
The conference was great. Kicked off with a keynote by Tarik Sedky, Chief Digital Officer at Young & Rubicam. He spoke quite earnestly about the truck coming down the highway, headed straight for the operational and technical aspects of all digital media – a rapid growth in demand for creativity and originality at all levels of publisher organizations. Check out gettheglass.com for one example he shared. And it turns out that Tarik did some time in Chatham County back in the day – he lived in Thunderbolt when he was working for Anderson Advertising out of Hilton Head on the Gulfstream account.
The first day of sessions focused on ad operations and video advertising, build v. buy for ad operations, motivating operations teams, rich media challenges and the like. Day two was all about the vendors, and I made some good contacts and renewed others. The final day was the most engaging, with less formal presentations that evolved into dynamic discussions on topics on widgets, mobile, and advertising issues in non-linear and AJAX environments. I’m looking forward to keeping in touch with new contacts.
