On April 2 the OFFICIAL* SES NYC 2007 Party & Events Schedule was posted in the SEW forum. To many attendees chagrin, most of the parties (except for the short “drink-ticket party”) were all private, including the Yahoo party which big PPC spenders were invited to at Chicago SES 2006 (6 coach busses to the disco). I guess now that Yahoo has imposed Panama they have no reason to court us anymore.
I posted a tongue-in-check comment to the thread: “This is a cruel tease for those who wallow in unconnectedness…maybe the qualifications to get into the cool parties could be more tangible-like billing over a million in PPC or attaining high rankings for keywords which return over 50 million documents (where there are 3000 webpages returned for “allintitle:keyword.”) See ya’ all in NYC.”
To my delight Chris Zaharias from Efficient Frontier responded: “Efficient Frontier dinner/bar-crawl clarification: Ours is a private party, but we’d definitely like to get interesting SEM people in attendance. The main reason we participate in SES is to learn about the industry we live in, so if you think you know an SEM thing or two and would like to attend, let me know. Chris Zaharias, SVP Strategic Initiatives, Efficient Frontier, chris at efrontier dot com”
Making a long story short I was invited to the Efficient Frontier Bash at China Grill and an excellent time was had by all. The EF guys, Tim, James Beriker, Morgan Simonson, Ian Martin, and Tim Krozek were just a blast to hang out with. The serendipity is the fact that EFrontier manages the largest portfolio of online-spend in the word and we opened talks regarding the possibility of mutually serving larger AIMCLEAR clients. I enjoyed the company of William Scully, Director eMarketing and Corporate Communications for Siemens.
The efrontier guys were a blast, the food was great and we all made new friends.