Abbreviated program well-received

A scaled-back AAN West conference drew just over 100 attendees from as far away as Florida and Ohio, says AAN Director of Operations Debra Silvestrin.

A faltering economy and pre-conference surveys led AAN to eliminate editorial, classified and design and production programming and focus instead on marketing and advertising seminars aimed at top management. In more robust economic years AAN West attendance has topped 400, Silvestrin says.

“I think the lower attendance was 100 percent due to the economy,’ says Jane Levine, publisher of the Chicago Reader.

Jay Conrad Levinson, the godfather of guerrilla marketing, and Alice Kemper, a sales training expert, were the featured presenters at the Feb. 8-9 conference in San Francisco.

Levinson led a three-hour business and marketing seminar Friday, which provided weapons suitable for use in the current difficult advertising environment. He revealed the tactics and secrets of guerrilla marketing, truths about online marketing, along with steps to succeed and save money in a guerrilla marketing campaign.

Alice Kemper, president of Sales Training Consultants, Inc., presented two three-hour seminars entitled “Powerful Partnering” and “The Power of Personality-Style Selling: It’s an Inside Job!”

In addition to these featured speakers, AAN members moderated seminars and panels on market research, automotive sales, and electronic production.

“Levinson and the auto panel made the conference more than worth the money for me,” Levine says.

AAN Marketing Director Adam Ebbin introduced AAN’s new marketing initiative, developed by advertising firm Abrials & Partners, Inc., which includes a 75-second multimedia marketing presentation, as well as printed materials. In the pipeline from Abrials are a customizable PowerPoint presentation and a series of ad buys in publications targeted at media buyers.