Does the ever-expanding sea of ad:tech exhibitors foretell a healthy digital marketing industry? It does, but maybe not in the way you think. Underscore Marketing's president explains.

Tuesday's walk through ad:tech New York's exhibit hall made me feel quite confident. Not in the way it used to, though. It used to be that the size of ad:tech's exhibit hall directly correlated with the health of the interactive marketing industry. Technically, it still does. Just not in the same way.

Meandering from booth to booth, I nodded knowingly at eager vendors, doing my best to convey that I probably wouldn't be stopping to chat. Most were unfamiliar faces attached to vaguely familiar companies, or companies I'd never heard of. The familiar faces on the floor tended to be people like me who were bewildered by the sheer volume of vendors at the show, who were looking for faces they knew in the crowd and not finding many. Where old friends ran into one another, they formed clumps in the aisles that blocked foot traffic. Their exasperated looks seemed to say, "Thank God you're here. I was worried I wasn't going to see anyone I know."

I saw the familiar purple of Yahoo's booth up ahead. Regrettably, no one I knew was there. Overhearing Yahoo's sales chatter with people on the show floor, I noted a contrast -- they're selling different solutions to the typical ad:tech attendee than they do to folks like me. And my thoughts recalled Doug Weaver's Oreo Doctrine.

This is the "transactional" half of the business. Sure, there are a few agencies and consultancies here, but they look as bewildered as I do. They're swimming in a sea of transactional vendors that sell solutions to optimize affiliate programs, append email addresses to marketing lists, scatter pay-per-click advertising across the digital landscape and -- above all -- get traffic.

Many of the salespeople speak of website traffic like it's an ingredient to add to a recipe -- something that can be poured from a bottle or sprinkled on top of a website to make it better. It's inconceivable to them that someone walking the floor at ad:tech wouldn't want generic website traffic. To them, nothing can survive without traffic, and all problems are solved by more traffic. You're getting traffic from somewhere, and it might as well be from them. The decision about whether or not to buy traffic from them should be as simple as greenlighting a trial. Give us a try. Even if it's just a little. We won't disappoint you.

My business is primarily on the other half of the Oreo -- the one Weaver calls "Marketecture." We solve high-level business problems. We use a lot of the same language as the transactional vendors, but when it comes to solving these problems, we might as well be speaking different languages. Looking around at other bewildered Marketects, we wonder how much bigger this exhibit floor can get when it's populated largely by vendors who are so immersed in the tactical and transactional. We hop from booth to booth and take cards. One day we might run into a problem for which the umpteenth performance-based ad network might be a potential solution, but we think it's far more likely that we'll end up leveraging relationships that were forged years ago.

Many of the vendors don't understand this. It doesn't matter that their ad network isn't significantly different from the hundreds of other ad networks exhibiting alongside it, or the hundreds more that came before it. What matters is that they represent another ad network you can try out. The strategic solution is a given: more traffic.

For the Marketects, though, the strategy is the only thing that isn't a given when one is confronted by a digital challenge. The disorienting part of wandering the ad:tech exhibit hall floor is that it hasn't occurred to many of the vendors there that the widget they're selling might be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

While the transactional vendors believe the solution lies in which email appending vendor to pick, the Marketects provide value by knowing when and if to recommend an email appending vendor.

That's where the frustration sets in. Transactional vendors think it's a foregone conclusion that you're appending emails. They're selling people on why they're the best email appending service, and the Marketects are selling advice on when and if it's appropriate to use an email appending service at all.

So why did this disorienting trip around the floor make me feel confident? Well, for many marketers, a larger volume of untargeted website traffic isn't the solution. Something else is. That puts Marketects in a good place. To see such a healthy state of commerce on the transactional side of the equation means the Marketecture side will be at least as healthy, owing to the notion that marketers will continue to rely on people who can make sense of it all.

Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.