It’s the second day of ad:tech here in New York and after spending the bulk of my day walking the exhibit hall floor and interviewing more than a dozen companies, I’ve been trying to make some sense of the things I’ve been seeing.

First, it seems like, for the first time in several years, there are actually buyers at the show. For the last few events it seemed to be the same companies doing the same things talking back at each other. At a typical show you’d see a hundred affiliate networks, but not a lot of advertisers or publishers. You’d see fifty mobile advertising platforms with no customers. Round it out with email marketers, SEOs, PPCs and whatever the next biggest thing of that year was supposed to be and you’d have a typical recent ad:tech. Not that it was ad:tech’s fault – we’ve been in a recession and getting buyers to show up and pony up cash was probably near impossible.

This year ad:tech seems to be full of energy and hope. Customers are walking the floor and they actually seem like they are ready to spend some money. I’m sure that’s a relief to both ad:tech organizers, and to the exhibitors that have spent tens of thousands of dollars in expenses to be here.

I wanted to take some and point a few ideas that I thought were executed well and caught my attention:

1. Sapient Interactive Coke Machine

One of the people I interviewed was Eric Healy, VP at Sapient. Sapient does lots of work across multiple channels with major brands. Instead of focusing on one particular avenue, they seem to strive to create a total interactive brand experience. For example, at their booth they had a Coke machine with a huge touchscreen. You could virtually spin the bottle of Coke, watch videos and, of course, get a Coke. It really rounded out a positive experience with one of the world’s leading and most recognizable products.

2. Elephant Traffic’s Mini Cooper Cab Rides

As I walked the show floor I was handed a flyer from Elephant Traffic. It said I could take a free cab ride in a Mini Cooper, anywhere in the city. Now, if you’ve ever been to the Javits Center, you know it can be excruciately painful to try and get a cab. Elephant Traffic solved that problem in a memorable way. Besides the great branding and the goodwill generated from offering somebody a convenient free ride, you also have 10 minutes or more of a captive audience to talk about your offering. I would love to see how they determine a success metric for this initiative, but it seems like a homerun.

3. Mogreet’s Relevantly Speaking Tie-In

I met with Mogreet CEO James Citron to shoot an interview for Relevantly Speaking. James was a great guest. He was comfortable, enthusiastic, personable and, oh yeah, they have a great mobile marketing product! After we finished shooting the segment James had the idea that we could send a video teaser of Relevantly Speaking out to a targeted user base using their video platform. We already offer RS across a dozen video channels, iTunes and RSS, but now we were talking about distributing via a mobile platform. He wasn’t trying to sell me, I think he was just genuinely giddy about an effective and unique way to use their technology to cross-promote our show.

I’m sure there were many other companies that were using outside-the-box ideas to stand out at the show. These were just the ones that stuck with me. I’d love to hear about some of the cool (or not so cool) things that you saw companies doing at ad:tech. Leave a comment below.