Where Top Brand Marketers And Partners Get Business Done

The dramatic shifts in the marketing industry are hard to miss. But the changes, while significant, have largely been within the same model of marketing.

Maybe it's time to rethink the model. What if brands were to explore a new direction that could transform marketing into something both extraordinarily effective and intensely meaningful?

In this keynote, Doug Levy, the CEO of imc², will introduce a new model – a different way to think about the practice of marketing that creates opportunities for monumental results. He will then unveil the results of proprietary research on sustainable brand relationships, and finally he will detail for our audience five practical principles for breakthrough success in the new model.

Visit relationshipera.com to discuss an emerging approach to marketing.

Brand safety is more than just no hate, no porn. In fact, as quality strategies, systems, and techniques emerge and evolve, brand advertisers are finding that they need to and CAN take control over what was once a "wild west" digital advertising environment, and reap the benefits. Learn how to avoid brand dilution and ensure that your ad does not appear adjacent to objectionable content, competitive content, or untimely content. How can you guarantee that you are advertising only with safe publishers, when your ads may be spread across dozens of online sites? Finally, the speakers will examine safety at the web page level rather than the site level, prevention vs. verification services, and the new wave of technologies aimed at ensuring brand quality online.

While many organizations are interested in the promises of social media (for example, reducing average cost per lead, or increasing customer satisfaction), most companies find it difficult to determine a path beyond experimentation.

Those who do scale their social media capabilities tend to encounter challenges that can be organizational, cultural, technical, and legal. Operationally, many organizations are challenged to give employees and teams enough support and empowerment to fully utilize social media for the organization, while also ensuring appropriate controls or accountability that ensure reasonable business results, such as appropriate ROI, the right level of shared resources, internal knowledge sharing, consistent customer experience, and so on.

For leaders who manage social media investments, this session provides frameworks and examples that attendees can apply. Specifically, Chris Boudreaux will introduce the five components of Social Media Governance: processes, roles, metrics, policies, and culture.

Throughout the session, Boudreaux will provide leading practices and insights from his client experience. The session ends with a framework for determining your current capabilities, where you want to go, and how to get your organization moving down a path that makes sense for your goals, team, and culture.

Brand marketers have long relied on personality differences, or psychographics, to define their targets. For example, BMW and Jaguar drivers may be demographically similar, but BMW drivers are more assertive and Jaguar drivers are higher in self esteem. Despite the importance of psychographics, brand marketers have never had a consistent way to define and reach their psychographic targets in media. Hear from Jim Meyer, CEO of Mindset Media, and Donald King of Kraft Foods as they discuss how breakthroughs in measurement and ad technology can help brands successfully define, understand, and reach their psychographic targets in online media.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... the Super Bowl is still the year's biggest TV event and that annoying football game persists in interrupting the most expensive ads ever, but what are those 3-million-dollar slots buying for brands in 2010? In an age of "Listenomics" do dictated-by-the-sponsor Super Bowl ads matter anymore? Sure, customers are watching, but do they run to the store to buy Gatorade, or do they just rush to Facebook to diss the ad?

Join Ad Age Columnist and “The Chaos Scenario” author Bob Garfield as he delivers his signature ad critiques the morning after and then digs into the role Super Bowl ads play in our hyper-connected, digital world. As the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the VMAs quickly become the last vestiges of must-see events, how should marketers think about branding? Our very own summit host Anne Murray will join Bob on stage to wrestle with these issues. There will be ample time for audience questions too, so come and watch the sparks fly!

We'll start this session by turning to members of our Marketers Only Meeting for the first Point/Counterpoint mini-debate emerging from their Sunday meeting, in which the marketers wrestle with key issues facing brands today. XLNTads President and longtime brand marketer Neil Perry lends a hand facilitating these mini-debates. In this one, the marketers will tackle social media.

Then we'll hear from David Smith, president of Engage In-Game Advertising, who'll talk about how brands in CPG and retail achieve marketing goals and develop unique consumer experiences through video game advertising programs. The gaming industry is still seeing incredible growth and is poised to become one of the leading consumer entertainment mediums.

Smith is followed by another Point/Counterpoint, where brand speakers take the stage to debate one of the more topical issues of the day – the mobile opportunity and is this the year.

Our next case study comes from Danielle Wolfson, who'll share details on how mobile is a key element in Taco Bell’s digital marketing strategy, providing accessibility for on-the-go customers to access Tacobell.com from anywhere at any time.

We’ll close the morning general session with tips to sellers offered by the marketers who attended the meeting Sunday.

As the skies clear, digital sellers are back to the hard work of rebuilding the financial foundations of their sites and of the industry. But all too easily, your sellers are distracted by the bright light and heat of fad technologies and industry hype. In this session of “Lunchbox Logic,” Upstream Group CEO Doug Weaver offers up a look at the fundamentals that make for a great digital seller and a solid media sales organization. Which are the key behaviors that sales leaders should identify, develop, track, and reward? What are the “repeatable actions” that build consistency and excellence in a digital organization? Site, platform, network, technology – regardless of your niche or focus, now is the time to lay in a quality foundation. Grab your lunchboxes and hardhats, it’s time to go back to work.

This highly interactive session is for sellers only. Bring your experience, your opinions, and your questions, and be prepared to leave with a notebook full of great management ideas and sales tips to help your team find its footing for 2010. Come early, as seating will be limited.

This master class will delve into how brands can successfully incorporate digital media as part of their overall campaigns that also include TV, in-store signage, email, and print. Using Con-Agra's Ro-Tel Tomatoes campaign as an example, Denise Zimmerman and David Larkins, NetPlus's VP of Marketing, will share tips and strategies on how to ensure online branding supports overall marketing and business goals. With that big picture set-up, Jennifer Rivas will then provide the laser focus on how social media in particular can be useful to a brand. Relying on listening tools, Red Robin better understands its customers and can reach them more effectively.

Sprite won major mommy mindshare during the cluttered back to school time with an integrated social media program that began with listening first and using consumer insights to inform strategy. Learn more about this award-winning social media program in this case study session.

The Internet has added new ways for companies to listen, augmenting surveys, focus groups, and other traditional market research. But the first generation of web listening tools was heavy on automation and light on real insights and action ability. The next generation of listening tools is designed to generate action across the enterprise cases so that brands evolve into “Listening Organizations.” Learn how web listening is changing, and how you can organize internally in order to discover better insights through listening and take advantage of them to deliver maximum business impact. You'll also get a sneak peek into what you should expect in the future, so that your company is ready.

In the shadow of one of the last traditional brand events – the Super Bowl – we meet to plot a course through a fragmented, evolving landscape. This session will bring together some of the best ideas from the conference, exploring how they relate to each other and to your brand strategy for the months ahead. Can a brand be safe in a chaotic, social world? How can we move social marketing from an ongoing experiment to a growing practice? Will ad technology save us from ourselves? Can the growing power of the consumer be to our advantage?

Stefan Tornquist, research director at MarketingSherpa, will examine these important questions through the lens of years of consumer and business research.

For the make-or-break launch of its Windows 7 operating system last Fall, Microsoft turned to word-of-mouth marketer House Party to activate consumer advocates, enlisting more than 40,000 consumers around the world to host simultaneous parties in their homes to debut Microsoft's new software. Learn how it worked in this case study.

Join us Monday night as we go on a journey around the world via stunning photography and the inside stories behind the lens. National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson will share his discoveries of jewels and treasures in his life-long quest to capture the diverse, cultural experiences that are the foundation of the best travel experiences.

Richardson has researched and photographed more than 40 stories for National Geographic Magazine and National Geographic Traveler. Richardson's assignments have taken him around the world three times, from the tops of active volcanoes, through the Celtic lands, and deep into America's heartland. Richardson’s most recent work on the “Edge of the World” is currently featured in National Geographic magazine’s January 2010 issue. See how he captured the islands’ wild magic that has endured the test of time.

Richardson's work for National Geographic Society stands alongside his lifetime of black-and-white documentary photographs of small-town life in his native Kansas. His work has been featured on CBS News Sunday Morning and ABC News Nightline. He is a Nikon “Legend Behind the Lens” and a winner of the Crystal AMI international.

Come and see an actual case study, and learn how your brand can reach and engage qualified consumers, through compelling rich units, across the web. See innovative approaches that premier brands are using to deliver engaging product and brand experiences, directly to the point where consumers are most engaged and receptive. We will review brand building and direct response techniques that ranked highest amongst advertisers in the second half of 2009, and we will showcase new ad unit types that are now producing exceptional results.

Are consumers smarter than brands? These case studies will highlight how JCPenny, Mountain Dew, and Burt’s Bees use online communities to drive product innovation, marketing campaigns, and brand propagation.