I just got my near-daily spam e-mail about the Chicago New Media Summit announcing that the price had been dropped. I’d had a feeling before that this event was in trouble, but this seals it. Here’s what I think they are doing wrong:

• At first, registration was invite-only. That hoity-toity bullshit might fly in New York, but not here.
• They are having it at the MCA. I don’t have anything against the MCA per se, but they obviously want this to be a wine & cheese event. Too bad for them that their audience would rather go to the pub.
• Corporate sponsors everywhere. Yeah, I get that they need help paying to put this on, but the mentions of the sponsors are being made in lieu of useful information.
• Too close to An Event Apart. Now that I’m a freelancer, I can tell you that even affording one conference relating to my field is going to be hard to pull off this year. There’s no way in hell I can go to two in one month and AEA is a hard act to beat.
• Not enough notice. AEA has had a date set for their next event for almost a year. This newer conference seemed to come out of someone’s ass just a few months ago. Even if I were still working for the man, they had a policy of only sending employees to one conference a year and anyone like me would’ve gotten approval for AEA at the beginning of the year when the company’s new budget went into effect.
• Who are these speakers? I only recognize 2 names on the speaker list and I don’t think I’m that out of touch. Also, some of these companies are not exactly ones that I would consider trail blazers of new media. I mean, c’mon… NBC Sports? If I were going, I’d ask them why they shut out Mac users from viewing videos on their Olympics website.
• The e-mails are getting more frequent. You know how sometimes Hollywood will push the marketing on a movie so hard that you know it must really suck?
• Their site is on Ning.com instead of their own domain. Seriously, a new media event that can’t even afford a real website? (Okay, now I’m just being catty.)