CPA Empire Puts On A Great Breakaway Event

A week ago today Tigh and I flew to Denver Colorado to do a behind the scenes video for CPA Empire and also attend the Media Breakaway event. Normally flying from Lincoln to Denver is about a 50 minute flight but there was bad weather which delayed us 3 hours taking off... then once in the air we were diverted south then west and THREE HOURS LATER finally landed in Denver. Once we landed, the captain told us we had to sit on the tarmac until the lightning passed. That would probably upset some but honestly I was so happy just to be alive after our crazy decent with 60 mph crosswinds. It was pretty intense. CPA Empire had sent a limo to the airport to take us to our hotel. That was pretty awesome of them! The first night we stayed at Radisson North Denver Graystone Castle which was just down the road from the Media Breakaway headquarters. The hotel was older but I really enjoyed it. It had one of those sleep number beds and other small little things that made for a really nice stay. I also got Iron Man from the in room movie selection and it was a great movie. I highly recommend it. The next day we got up about 8am and Joe picked us up (he was our assigned driver) and took us to the CPA Empire offices. We busted out the camera and started grabbing employees one by one and asking them what they did and some general questions about their jobs and affiliate marketing that I thought people would be interested in. We also had some fun with them asking questions like what it was like to work for Scott Richter among other stuff. About noon we wrapped up recording for the day and headed back to checkout of our hotel and into the downtown Hyatt Regency which was the Media Breakaway Conference Hotel. This hotel was decked out. Check out the view from my room: After getting moved in we went down to the conference. The first panel was on compliance. Amanda Barry started the panel. She gave a very informative presentation about email compliance. I took a lot of notes ;). Next up was Jan Michael Zavislan who is the Deputy Attorney General for Consumer Protection for the state of Colorado. His presentation covered a ton of legislation from the Can Spam Act all the way to the recent Denver Spam legislation. The next Panel was all about International Affiliate Marketing. I truly believe there are a ton of new opportunities with international affiliate marketing (huge in mobile) right now and its only going to get better as these countries advertisers start to see the value of affiliates. Then I was on the Affiliate Crossfire panel which was billed kind of like a debate style panel where sometimes tensions flare. While I had some different opinions during the panel I think we pretty much all agreed on most of the topics. Still though lots of the attendees told me it was the most informative panel of the day. Being most of the "affiliates" there have more hands on experience with affiliate marketing then I do I thought that was a pretty great compliment. That was the last panel of the day, and then we headed to a nice reception with drinks and appetizers. It was a nice little networking event before the dinner. The dinner was unreal. It was like 5 courses. You had a choice between many main dishes. I went with the chicken and it was fantastic. Then during the dinner Steve Richter, President of CPA Empire, made the announcement that they were re branding as affiliate.com and also dumping direct track for their tracking system. The latter statement got a HUGE roar from the crowd. Direct Track has become the red headed step child of the tracking industry. Personally I agree its a fantastic move for them to move the tracking in house. After Dinner we headed to the club 5 degrees which was just down the road. We had a blast getting hammered with all the super affiliates and CPA Empire employees. At 2AM we staggered back to the hotel.... and the GetAds folks were ready for more! So I went with them back to the GetAds office downtown office for more partying and playing rock band until 4:30am. I finally got back to my hotel room and crashed about 5 something. The next day I rolled out about 9:30am and did some more interviews with employees before heading back to my room and packing up to head to the airport. Had a nice safe trip back. I would just like to say thank you to all the CPA Empire staff for hosting us for this incredible event. The behind the scenes videos have been sent to the editing team and we should have it in the next couple weeks. Great times!