This Week’s Waste Of Life: The AAAA Account Planning Conference

Earlier this week PSFK attended the annual conference put on by the American Ass of Advertising Agencies for planners and strategists who work at ad agencies and the like. Several people we spoke to have suggested they enjoyed the event but we think they were just fooling themselves. ‘Scuse the French, but the whole show was effing appalling. How shall we start?

PAYOLA - Some readers may know our view about the pay-to-speak scam at conferences. The AAAA APC was full of it: thinly disguised paid-for sales pitches by sponsors like Google, Time Warner, Yahoo! sponsors. The AAAA forced 800 of us to listen to information media planners would have been bored sick about. The AAAA stole our time and charged us for it. Shameful behavior - especially when there’s such a call for transparency in the industry.

PAID SPEAKERS - By our estimate there were only three or four speakers who actually got paid. The speech by Sir Ken Whatshisname was very well received but for $45,000* in fees you’d expect it to be. The problem when you pay a speaker $45,000 is that you get a show - 35 minutes of theater, pomp, jokes and packaging and ten minutes of content. Content we can’t remember. Obviously a last minute panic-buy as he’s not on the online speaker list. And oh, we loved how Ken had flyered every seat with a sheet about his speaking service. Classy.

BRUCE MAU / PAID SPEAKERS 2 - Now, we’re not saying that Bruce’s Massive Change isn’t a critical movement to cope with the future, it’s just he didn’t know who the hell his audience was. When he was introduced the AAAA said that they had asked Bruce twice before to come and speak. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to because he didn’t really know what a planner was and it didn’t sound like he really cared. And it’s pretty much by chance that his $30,000* fee speech happened to reflect some of the most pressing issues planning faces.

UNPAID SPEAKERS - Except Eric Ryan, they were all crap and of no use whatsoever. Go on, admit it. A conference that spent so much time talking about change that failed to inspire change.

I’M REALLY HERE TO RECRUIT - Was there no senior attendee or unpaid speaker there who wasn’t there to recruit new staff? At least Eric Ryan was honest enough to admit it at the end of the only worthwhile speech of the conference. Rumor has it that one recruiter went through the attendee list then spammed them all using LinkedIn during the first night. Classy. (If anyone remembers who it was, leave their name in the comments section).

THREE THOUSAND BUCKS! - $1,300 for a ticket. $700 for flights. $900 for a crap hotel. $100 on taxis. For a small business like PSFK that’s a nightmare figure. And we can’t be the only small company attending. It’s outrageous they coax us to come to a conference once a year and charge us that much for a crap show. We did ask for a small business discount but we were ignored. We did ask for a press pass but we were ignored. There’s a reason why we charge $300 for the PSFK Conference Los Angeles - it’s because we want to be inclusive and we don’t believe in ripping people off.

ONE MILLION, FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS - Multiply price by ticket sales you get $1,040,000; subtract a little for discounts, speakers, space; then add sponsor and Payola fees, and you end up at… $1,040,000!

NETWORKING - Ok, we all go there for the networking. But come on - unless you’re hunting for a job in a different city you could go to your local Coffee Morning or Likemind and meet more interesting and useful people (and yes, we asked if we could do a Likemind in San Diego for the conference and they said yes and then when we asked if they’d comp our tickets, we got ignored).

NETWORKING 2 - Everyone interesting already had a blog anyway. Now, we just know that they don’t quite look as young as they do in their posted photos.

BREAK-OUT SESSIONS - Yes, they were the highlight of the conference. Finally something useful. But was it worth traveling all that way? We mean, Zeus Jones deck is already on Facebook; Ed Cotton, Gareth Kay and the others have blogs that already talk about the things they spoke about; Aki Spicer has Twitter; and Mark Earls has a blog and a book he was peddling. So what really was the point? And each was for 1 hour 15 minutes? Life is too short.

“WASSUPPLANNERS?”- You have 800 creative minds and the AAAA & Yahoo! give us a local wedding band (and cheap wine). Any imaginative influential organization could have worked out a deal with a record company, no?

CHEESY HOTELS - I know let’s put a conference on in a cheesy conference hotel in the conference hotel district in a conference city. No imagination. No creativity.

SAN DIEGO - “We’re glad to be back in San Diego because we can’t think of a better place for planners to get inspiration,” the AAAA announced on the first morning. Read that line again and tell us why we should give the AAAA the chance to hold another Account Planning Conference again.

WIFI - A conference without WiFi. In 2007? Yeah, we know our New York conference didn’t have WiFi either but we were going to get charged $5000 and our average ticket price was $100, but you get 800 of us in a room paying $1,300 and the only WiFi is in the hotel’s reception and you have to pay for that too. And yes, the PSFK Conference Los Angeles will have free WiFi.

AAAA - It’s about advertising. Planning should be about so much more. It’s time to divorce.

It’s conferences like this that forced us to create our own conferences in the first place. For true inspiration and fuel for change, come to the PSFK Conference Los Angeles on September 18. Alternatively, go the Influx Ideas conference in San Francisco in October. Both great days.

* Speaker fees are guestimations based on the prices we get quoted when we phone around for some of these ponses.