Those of you in the audience who spent all but the last few years being wined and dined by vendors at the Catalog Conference may enjoy one final glass of champagne this evening ... the ACCM is no more.
Of course, the Catalog Conference really wasn't the Catalog Conference once it became the "ACCM". Catalog marketers paid close attention to the name change, opting instead for Internet Retailer and Shop.org for advanced marketing topics.
Shop.org and Internet Retailer would be well-served by a post-mortem of the missteps of ACCM. A decade from now, it is not hard to envision an environment where Shop.org and Internet Retailer are considered old-school fossils when compared with the Hologram Marketing Conference (HMC) --- I mean, who the heck would use coal-based e-commerce servers to place orders on landfill-unfriendly laptops when one is able to verbally tell a solar-powered Hologram to buy whatever you want in a virtual shopping environment in your own living room?
You can only imagine the session titles at the old-school conferences ... "E-Commerce + Hologram Marketing, Using Your Website To Drive Multichannel Traffic To Your Personalized Hologram", or "Don't Forget Twitter When Launching Your Hologram Marketing Campaigns". You can imagine the rhetoric ... "Customers who use both e-commerce and hologram marketing spend 88% more than customers who use just hologram marketing, according to Woodside Research."
Sounds odd now, but we all know it is coming.
Catalogers, what are your favorite memories of the Catalog Conference?
It was amazing how quickly it went from the most relevant conference to the conference that no one attended. In the late 90's you couldn't miss the catalog conference!
ReplyDeleteLike a meteor dropping from the sky, Jay!
ReplyDeleteKevin,
ReplyDeleteWhat would be your suggestion as a conference to replace the ACCM one ? I'm part of a network of European direct marketers willing to attend to a top US event about direct commerce (both off & on-line).
Thanks.
Antoine Coubray
If you want to go to a catalog-specific conference, go to NEMOA in March (www.nemoa.org) ... if you like online tactics, go to Internet Retailer in June or Shop.org in September.
ReplyDeleteThanks a lot Kevin. Décision will happen between IRCA and shop.org. Will you speak at one of this évent ?
ReplyDeleteI'll be at both conferences if they ask me to speak, so far, no noodles!
ReplyDelete