I have never been to Advertising Week but it showed up as an upcoming event on my LinkedIn page last week and I decided to attend.

Advertising Week’s mission is to galvanize the industry by creating an entertaining, enlightening and engaging platform for disparate parts of the business.

I think I went a bit overboard when I signed up for seminars. In total I’ve signed up to attend 13. Today I attended “The Way Forward” and “Google: Experiments in Digital Creativity”.

The presenter for “The Way Forward” were Bob Greenberg and Barry Wacksman of R/GA. Their talk centered on the future of advertising and what works or doesn’t work in the current advertising agency model. Consumers they said have more choice, a larger voice and more control than ever before. Traditional advertising isn’t going to motivate them to buy your product or service. Clients are cutting budgets and squeezing the profit margins of agencies. They must innovate or suffer the consequences.

Google’s talk was more fun. They showcased several ways consumers are using Google’s sites and APIs like Google Maps API, YouTube API to create entertaining projects. Check out the presentation here.

You can follow @advertisingweek on Twitter or see what people are saying by following the hashtag #adwk.

More action tomorrow. I have 4 seminars on my agenda. Fun times….