Notes from Advertising Week New York 2026: I asked strangers one simple question. Why come in person?
From Oct 5th to the 8th, the New York Advertising Week (AWNY) conference came to life in the Penn District in Midtown Manhattan. According to the event’s website, AWNY is a go-to resource for staying ahead in the world of advertising and marketing. Digiday reported that conference registrations doubled, from 10,000 in 2022 to 20,000 in 2025.
Lucky me: as a marketing lecturer, founder of a small marketing measurement practice, and occasionally lonely entrepreneur, I managed to get a ticket.
Yet, in an era when webinars, YouTube videos, Substack newsletters, podcasts, and countless other digital resources promise to keep us abreast of industry developments, the question such a conference raises is: Why do so many people flock to in-person conferences like AWNY? What, precisely, are they getting that the internet cannot deliver from the comfort of their own homes?
I had my theories, but I decided to take a cue from Anand Giridharadas, one of today’s prominent commentators on civic life, who advocates being “curious rather than knowing it all in advance.” As a professed lifelong learner, I found this advice easy enough to swallow. So, I dared myself to randomly approach people at the conference and simply ask them why they had come.
Once inside, I encountered a bustling crowd of attendees hurrying to and from the many speaker panels and vendor attractions among the four floors of activities. Others were gathered in small friend groups or standing in one of the endless coffee lines. The atmosphere was at once overwhelming and exhilarating. Almost immediately upon arrival, I headed downstairs to the lower level, where The Female Quotient had commandeered an entire pavilion, although they called it “The Lounge”.
“Who in here is hiring?”
While standing at the back of the audience listening to a panel of AI evangelists urging attendees to cast their fears aside and climb aboard the technological express, I fell into an impromptu conversation with an early-career account executive who works at a major broadcasting company.
She was deeply anxious about AI. In her view, this mysterious and potentially harmful technology should be restricted to applications such as curing disease and otherwise kept out of the hands of the public and profit-seeking corporations alike.
As our conversation continued, her motivation for attending AWNY emerged. Although gainfully employed in the industry, she had arrived at the conference with her professional antennae raised and finely tuned to the possibility of her next career move.
There it was: my first finding. In-person conferences can serve as informal job markets, offering access to opportunities that are not posted online.
“So nice to see you again!”
Next, I met a bubbly mid-career influencer marketing professional who was busy on her cellphone while absorbing the presentations and the room’s infectious energy.
From her perspective, AWNY was at least partly, maybe mostly, a social occasion. She looked forward to the serendipitous encounters with industry friends whom she rarely saw in the course of her day-to-day work. The conference also offered an opportunity to strengthen relationships with her team in ways where video conferencing, for all its convenience, often falls short.
Her answer suggested that while professional development is about acquiring new information, sometimes it is also about renewing the relationships that make professional life enjoyable.
A Veteran Switches Sides
A few minutes later, I encountered a seasoned professional with a long history of attending AWNY and serving as a speaker on its many panels. This year, however, she had the luxury of sitting across from the stage instead of being on it.
For once, she could simply listen, absorb, and reflect on the insights of contemporary thought leaders without having to prepare remarks for her own presentation.
Her experience highlighted an often-overlooked benefit of conferences. Even accomplished professionals need opportunities to step outside the demands of being the expert and become students again.
“I’ll send you an email.”
Standing near the line for coffee and snacks was a seemingly carefree business development professional who had a clear explanation for why in-person conferences worked for him.
It was all about making that initial introduction.
In his experience, meeting someone face-to-face created the conditions for more effective follow-up calls and emails. People, he explained, are much more likely to open an email from someone whose name and face they recognize than from a complete stranger.
This may seem obvious, but it points to an important distinction between digital communication and in-person networking. In a world where much of our inbox is considered spam, a face-to-face introduction may be the one thing that allows that follow-up email to break through the clutter.
In-the-Real
Nearby, I met another seasoned professional, this one, with 25 years of industry experience, now working in performance media sales. He was emphatic that online meetings could not adequately accommodate the complexities involved in initiating and developing client relationships. Nor, in his view, could they deliver effective thought leadership in quite the same way.
For him, the in-person connection is irreplaceable.
His position was a reminder that subtle cues, the ones that convey trust and credibility and that we read intuitively, play a critically important role in business relationships and can often only be assessed in person. For professionals whose work depends on winning confidence on the way to winning business, in-the-real nuances can make all the difference.
The Value of Showing Up
Next, I made my way to the tech stage, where panelists were discussing AI as if it were an imperative to be adopted as extensively and as responsibly as possible.
There, I met a soft-spoken engineer who offered a more abstract explanation for the value of attending in person. According to him, the very investment required to show up-- the time, attention, effort, and resources involved, signals a willingness to invest in one another and is a source of value in itself.
For the Betterment of Humankind
Perhaps the most striking response came from a wise owl in the guise of the self-assured owner of Scentonomy, a wellness business.
She argued that in-person conferences were not only good for business but potentially good for humanity, and for societal well-being. Drawing on the less widely discussed health implications of “in-person to in-person” interaction, she suggested that our growing loneliness crisis may be contributing to a range of health problems, and that those problems might be eased, in part, by spending more time with other people. It was an intriguing proposition that gave me pause. Could some of the benefits of gathering in person extend well beyond networking and professional development?
I would hardly have expected a marketing conference to emerge as a potential prescription for the loneliness epidemic, let alone other health issues. Yet there I was, contemplating the possibility that a crowded event space and a shared conversation might offer something that no algorithm could quite reproduce.
A key takeaway for me is that although we work in an industry increasingly preoccupied with artificial intelligence, automation, data, and operating efficiencies, one of the most valuable experiences may be decidedly analog: showing up, making eye contact, exchanging ideas, standing in long coffee lines, and just spending time together under the same roof.
My informal qualitative study at AWNY was hardly grounded in the scientific method. Among other things, the people I approached were clearly not a representative sample of the general population of attendees. Nevertheless, their responses offered a revealing cross-section of why people opt in to meeting real people in real places.
As someone who measures marketing for a living, I find all this a little humbling. Almost none of what these people described would show up in a dashboard. A handshake by the coffee line might surface weeks later as a ‘direct’ visit or a search for someone’s name, with nothing to connect it back to the moment it began. Perhaps some future AI will learn to make that connection. For now, I’m delighted with my untracked discoveries.
