Internet Week NY: A Digital Feast

What a week, this week in New York! For those of you off the grid (or in South Africa for the World Cup), this week is Internet Week in the Big Apple. If you thought Social Media Week overflowed with pundits and pontificators ushering in a new digital world order, #IWNY puts Social Media Week to shame.

To give you a sense of #IWNY’s real-time impact, I don’t remember #SMWNY crashing Twitter. But sure enough, Internet Week’s rapacious participants have apparently incapacitated Twitter for much of the week (though my BB Twitter app seems unaffected).

In addition to its full sked of events, other influential organizations in the digital media space chose this week to hold their NY confabs. Among them:

— Mashable Media Summit. Watch it live and taped here.

— John Battelle’s CM Summit

— IAB’s Innovations Days @ Internet Week

And if you think we’ve reached a saturation point, think again. All three premium-priced events listed above sold out!

On Monday evening,. I had the Fortune of attending the launch party for David Kirkpatrick‘s “The Facebook Effect,” hosted by MDC-Partners at Michael’s. Apparently, David segued that same night from Michael’s to Cipriani for a second book party in his honor (if you believe Jon Fine).

The next day I found myself at Internet Week’s headquarters where I ran into Social Media Club co-founder Howard Greenstein to whom I expressed my amazement at the number of high quality events and speakers descending upon our city. He told me that his friends in San Francisco were befuddled by the notion of an Internet Week, and that Internet Week is every week in the Bay area. I thought to myself, “probably not for long” (if you believe CNN).

I was able to catch the inimitable Gary Vaynerchuk (@GaryVee) who took the open stage at #IWNY HQ to wax extemporaneously, poetically (and profanely) on why Google’s days our numbers.

I didn’t record exactly what he said, but in essence, he proclaimed that the days of gaming Google to garner one’s ranking in the search engine’s organic results are numbered. He said that he’ll be getting his restaurant recommendations, not from search, but from his “17 most trusted friends” in his social channels.

I then sauntered over to the IAB confab in an adjacent auditorium where I sat in on a panel called “To GRP Or Not To GRP: The Never Ending Measurement Conundrum”

IAB described the session as follows:

The GRP debate has been raging as long as online video has been a reality. While a true fix is still potentially a few years down the road, the current fever-pitch pace of screen convergence seems to demand a workaround today. If you can’t compare apples to apples, is it better to at least compare apples to…pears? Or does this just create more obstacles on the road to real metrics?

The session featured (pictured l. to r.):

— Dean Donaldson, Director, Digital Experience, Eyeblaster

— David Smith, Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Mediasmith

— Beth Uyenco, Global Research Director, Microsoft Advertising

— Matt Wasserlauf, Chief Executive Officer, BBE

— Moderator: Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief, MediaPost

I was most enamored with the remarks by Eyeblaster’s Dean Donaldson who described a world (in five years’ time) where Internet-delivered video – via big screens and small – will once and for all allow marketers to interactively engage the exact demographic they seek (with no “waste”). He personally sounded relieved that finally, he wouldn’t have to sit through those come-ons for feminine hygiene products.