Advertising Week Begins Monday, Focusing on Technology and Returning Veterans

By STUART ELLIOTT

It has been said many times that the most popular words in the advertising business are “new and improved.” But the phrase offers a way to describe changes in store when the ninth annual Advertising Week takes place in New York next week.

The event, scheduled to begin on Monday and end next Friday, has new sponsors - among them Adobe, Amazon, AMC Networks, Machinima, Pandora, Premier Retail Networks, Telemundo, Time Inc. and Twitter - who will join returning sponsors like AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Microsoft.

Also new is a trade show, billed as a technology showcase, which is being called the Advertising Week Experience - possibly because the initials spell “AWE.” The estimated 40 exhibitors will be based at the Times Center on West 41st Street.

“It will not be a shlockfest,” said Matt Scheckner, who has been the executive director of Advertising Week since it began in 2004. “It has a very classy look.”

In another new step, Advertising Week 2012 will begin what it calls Operation Deploy, in partnership with the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. The goal of the initiative is to find jobs in the ad industry for returning veterans. Two dozen agencies and companies have agreed to interview job seekers, with a target for each participant to hire one veteran.

On the improvement front, organizers of Advertising Week are hoping to untangle logistical difficulties, primarily complaints from attendees that the sites for events are spread across Manhattan.

So the more than 150 panels, speeches and other events will take place at fewer sites that are closer to each other. For example, scores of events will take place in Times Square, at the Times Center; the Nederlander Theater, also on West 41st Street; a newly refurbished Liberty Theater, with entrances on West 41st and West 42nd Streets; and the Nasdaq Market S ite, at 4 Times Square.

Another improvement, Mr. Scheckner said, will be “to try to make more sense of the program” by grouping events into tracks that include mobile marketing, the intersection of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley and multicultural marketing.

More information about Advertising Week can be found on the Web site advertisingweek.com.  There is also a Twitter feed under the handle @advertisingweek.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter.