The emergence of "native advertising" is a critical moment for brand advertising and agencies. Next year marks the 20th anniversary of the banner ad, but for years now, it has been clear that display advertising, both on the web and mobile, needs to progress beyond the standard boxes where it has been contained. Native advertising delivers a clear alternative to move ad dollars, but more importantly, the ability for advertising's storytellers to tell a more complete and engaging story. But what is it? How does it work? Does it scale? What do today's agencies need to know to work in this space? These questions will be answered, and more importantly, this session will demonstrate how advertising native to the experience, whether on the web or mobile, is a great opportunity for agencies to build relationships with brand clients and their consumers in dramatic ways that traditional banners and display ads fail to do. And the proof is in the numbers with results that dwarf the same old, same old, tired display tactics and strategies we all know.

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The rise of big data now allows hundreds of data points to be mined and aggregated in an attempt to better understand predictable behaviors. However, people are not defined based on disparate data points. Most data lacks human context and does not offer insight into the how and the why behind the who, what, where and when. It is also becoming increasingly challenging to generate actionable analysis from big data sets, which is requiring the need to establish a new set of metrics that provide greater insight into the motivating drivers of consumer behavior.

Many companies still correlate past effects to predict future effects, without understanding causation. In our highly fragmented and socially connected digital world, it is becoming increasingly important to connect with people based on their values, needs, resistances, interests, cultures and communication preferences. To see people in this way requires a different lens. In this session we will explore how some companies are using innovative techniques to better serve the needs of consumers, while improving marketing performance.

Programmatic mechanisms are revolutionizing the way marketers buy digital media. In fact, by the end of 2013, there will be over 1 million ad impressions available every second to advertisers. However, to date, it's mainly been siloed to seemingly "black box" trading desks, optimizers and technologists. For the digital planner who has spent a career buying media using strategic thinking, strong research and leveraging experience to best steward marketing budgets, this channel can sometimes feel overwhelming. Are jobs going to be lost to algorithms and robots?

A common misperception is that programmatic inventory isn't stratified and it's just a single, big pipe of unsold impressions where marketing creativity and brand building can't coexist. Programmatic buying is simply a new tool for the marketer. It still requires marketers to understand where it fits in the overall campaign strategy and how best to use it. The marketers who embrace this channel now will find themselves ahead of the game.

In this session, programmatic experts will demystify the channel and demonstrate how there are many different types of inventory and targeting available so that media planners can better understand the opportunities available. Learn where current, proven techniques and new, cutting edge tactics converge to build campaign portfolios that embrace the best of both worlds. Media buyers who attend this session will become fluent in the common jargon surrounding programmatic media buying, and walk away with a new appreciation of where programmatic can fit in their daily lives.

What's deeper than a consumer's shopping and buying behaviors online? Deeper than social media "chatter?" Deeper than what semiotics software (sentiment analysis) can hope to pick up? The deeper, abiding reality is a consumer's core personality. No, were not talking about Myers-Briggs. Instead, it's a combination of facial coding and the Big 5 Factor that can really unlock big data's potential. How so? By going deeper than cognitive reasoning to segment consumers according to emotive profiles that illuminate how they will take in information, decide and act. Then both the marketing mix and the advertising copy itself can become more effective by quantifying and linking fleeting instinctive responses to ongoing emotive tendencies.

These days it's not simply about a message and a medium. Technology is taking over in the digital advertising realm, and marketing and technology have converged. There are now technology solutions for all aspects of marketing, and the "Brave New Industry" needs to be one that embraces this convergence and grows with it.

The presentation examines the convergence of online and offline advertising providing unique insight across digital, including TV, mobile and social. Ben Fox looks at where advertisers are moving their budgets and then digs into the advertising technologies that will drive monumental changes in engagement and effectiveness. Fox will also provide a snapshot of how the explosion of screens is impacting the entire advertising ecosystem, and he will share his take on how agencies will bravely confront a world of infinite inventory at the dawn of CTV, Google Glass and the "Nth screen."

With consumers turning to multiple screens for their content, ad planning and executing will become increasingly more complex. Fox walks you through what has driven the agency's business over the years (strategy? creative? planning?) and how product lines will evolve to meet this complexity.

Dell has been able to show the financial value of social media by empowering its employees with the right tools to analyze their business and make data-driven decisions. The outcomes have been amazing. Marketing, product, support, corporate, sales, M&A and other business units have been able to act on data to increase sales, improve NPS, make marketing programs more effective and reduce customer support costs. Agencies will need to step up their data analytics expertise and offerings if they want to prove their added value.

All retail brands struggle with how to leverage the complex and ever-changing social platforms for local retailers. Using client Southeast Toyota Distributors as a case study, 22squared's Chris Tuff, Southeast Toyota's Julie Tullis and BLiNQ Media's Dave Williams will discuss how brands and marketers can best stay ahead of the evolving social platforms, as well as why they chose Facebook as the foundation for creating true Word Of Mouth on behalf of dealers. They will address creative, attribution, ROI, local at scale, how to use paid to scale WOM, and share 10 sure-fire techniques for brands to win locally on Facebook. BLiNQ Media is now working with Gannett, which acquired BLiNQ in August, to drive social advertising solutions for local and national brands.

Big data holds big promise for brands, but only if they have the tools and skills to collect, analyze and extract value from the petabytes of customer and audience data generated every day. In this session, hear a case study from Bird's Eye. Learn how the iconic food brand leveraged artificial intelligence advertising technology from Rocket Fuel to analyze petabytes of data to better understand its customers and then automate and optimize media buying programmatically to improve brand reach and sales. Agencies and brands will learn best practices for deploying programmatic buying to reach micro-segments across channels (web, mobile, video and social), so they can engage more of the right audiences with the right messages at the right time.

With over 203 million Americans consuming media on multiple screens, the demand for strategies that find audiences whenever and wherever they are, with the right creative, is critical for brands. Justin Evans, EVP of emerging media for Collective, and Starcom Director Ariti Bhansali, who oversees the Allstate account, will breakdown how Collective's TVAccelerator was able to help Allstate identify the sweet spot between TV and digital advertising. This discussion will include insights and tactics Allstate used to reach its exposure and frequency campaign goals.

Five years ago, right here at Lost Pines, iMedia Senior Analyst and Upstream Group CEO Doug Weaver offered up "The Oreo Doctrine," a groundbreaking presentation which predicted the very split which this week's Summit will examine. Weaver's two sides of the Oreo, "transaction" and "marketecture," morphed into "programmatic" and "native" and continue to exert their gravitational pull on the math and mad men, respectively. But can these two competing schools of thought be brought together? Weaver says yes, and will explore how, in brief, provocative keynote remarks. He'll then lead a candid and thought-provoking discussion and town hall featuring leaders from the "math" and "mad" schools of thought.

You think you've got a handle on your revenue model. You've done your revenue projections for the coming year and think you have a pretty good idea how your business will run over the next few years. But then something big happens. What if the industry suddenly walked away entirely from impressions? How about a future where computer-based internet browsing suddenly seemed as dated as the 14.4 modem? Yesterday's heretic is today's prophet and tomorrow's sage. Only by considering the possibilities can we get control of our own future. In a provocative, seller-only breakfast session, Upstream Group CEO and iMedia Senior Analyst Doug Weaver offers up five "futures" which can challenge, invigorate and possibly save the digital ad business.

The funny thing about all the consumer data collected by brands is that it's of no use if it isn't used in the formation of advertising campaign strategies -- and the cold, hard data point of the matter is that it's not. Josh Sklar, president and creative director of the virtual advertising agency, Heresy, and former global chief creative of a few large WPP agencies, will explain the best ways for data professionals to work with creative teams. This way, creatives are not facetiously nodding their heads as they listen to valuable insights, only to ignore them in lieu of gut, experience and imagination. There will be a hands-on workshop component to help you understand the typical process a creative director and strategist will go through in determining the best way to achieve the client's goals and where exactly they would welcome input. For their upcoming book, "Digital Doesn't Matter (and other advertising heresies)," Sklar and his writing partner have interviewed over 120 global agency and client-side marketing professionals to uncover heresies in the business that are causing it to collapse and require transformation, and he will share some of these findings, as well.

In a distant past, creativity and data lived and worked side-by-side and made beautiful music together. But then outside forces intervened, and the members of the band started their own successful solo acts. On their own, creative and data each had a long string of top 10 hits, but with the rise of the networked era, something seemed wrong. There was so much going on, yet so many connections were being missed. They both knew it was time to get the act back together and out on the road.

Creativity and data -- poets and quants -- rediscovered how much power their combined voices could project. This is about bringing data out from backroom analytics and "below the line" specialists into the frontline brand experience. This is about fusing instinctive creative strategies with substance and certainty. The real genius of data driven marketing isn't the precision and immediacy of the data, it's putting that data to work, in real-time, up front and across the entire communications spectrum.

The modern marketing communications organization needs to make data and analytics a core part of its business. Partnering data specialists with creators of brand experience, content, social and community at every point of the process has a radical effect on outcomes. This presentation will share perspective on the organization, experience and outcomes of evolving the agency model -- an inside look at getting the band back together.

Join LIN Digital for an exciting night out at the Rattle Inn in downtown Austin! Located in the bustling West 6th Street district, the Rattle Inn will host this exclusive after party complete with live music, open bar featuring signature drinks and Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ food truck. Be sure to book your departure flight for Wednesday, May 8- you won't want to miss this event.

Facebook's mission is to make the world more open and connected. What's an obvious result of this? More data. With more than a billion people worldwide, and 650 million of those on mobile devices, Facebook is already an extremely valuable platform for marketers. Combine the enormous reach and engagement with the fact that consumers use their authentic identity on Facebook, and things get really interesting for marketers.

In this talk, Erin Hunter, Facebook's Global Head of Consumer Packaged Goods, will explore some of the dramatic ways marketing is being changed by the abundance of available data. Whether data- or creative-minded, smart marketers know they need to reach the right consumer at the right time on the right device... and increasingly that means doing it on Facebook.

In response to this, Facebook has developed partnerships with data leaders Acxiom, Epsilon, and Datalogix to enable marketers of alltypes to develop targeting that drives their business in new and meaningfulways. Erin will share some results from the early stages of these unique targeting efforts from various categories,including CPG, ecommerce, auto and financial services. Also in this talk, she will outline the opportunities better data will bring to the entire marketing ecosystem- and how that drives a better world for both marketers and consumers in a more connected world.

A burning subject that many digital media minds are beginning to grapple with is the evolution of programmatic media buying and its gaining popularity and effect on the industry. Some may be wondering how and if these evolving capabilities are enhancing the delivery of quality inventory, as well as how it is providing faster and more transparent communication between advertisers, publishers and those that fall between.

Join us as we sit down with some of the web's most respected publishers to learn their thoughts on emerging trends such as the evolution of programmatic, the future of cookie targeting and how they are providing value to advertisers. Compelling industry data will be shared and openly discussed, and will offer the audience an honest look at the current and future market for agencies and advertisers.

Consumers spend more than 96% of their time online consuming content, viewing thousands of web pages in a given month. The evolution of real-time bidding (RTB) has created a powerful opportunity for marketers to maximize these opportunities by delivering the right ad to the right consumer, for every individual impression. But efficiently identifying the best possible prospects across the web, and the best impressions to drive them through the funnel, remains challenging to execute at scale. An effective RTB approach must also take into account rapidly changing consumer web behavior as well as seasonality and other unique considerations for every marketer's desired action. Quantcast's Principal Product Manager, David Grant, will explain how big data, real-time modeling, and RTB can work together to address these challenges by showcasing real client case studies and results.

Learn how data can be used to answer the age-old question: Did it move products off the shelf? Advancements in ad technology now allow advertisers to determine if users who saw an advertisement actually purchased a product -- or a competitor's -- and to optimize campaigns to drive specific actions. Videology showcases new research and case study results from leading brands that are using this technology to drive their digital strategies and improve ROI. The presentation focuses on how brands can connect their digital in-stream video advertising, as well as mobile in-stream video and display advertising, to specific offline purchases in key verticals such as auto, CPG, retail and others.