No matter how many CMOs claim (in public) to embrace online, don’t you get the feeling that first thing in the morning – before they open their eyes, pour the coffee, grab their iPhones – they wish the internet would just disappear?

We close this week’s iMedia Brand Summit with a rousing, four-part session about what digital brand marketers need to move forward, take best advantage of the ever-changing opportunities afforded by interactive media, and assume their rightful place as key to a corporation’s overarching brand strategy, rather than being limited only to DR.

The State of Online Brand Measurement: eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey – author of a recent report on this topic – kicks off our Town Hall meeting with a high-speed tour of how brands are measuring their online marketing efforts today, what engagement metrics we need to move forward, as well as the short and long-term obstacles and opportunities facing marketers.

Our Chief Facilitator Scot McLernon then takes over to guide us through two roundtable debates with our floor moderators (Brad Berens, Sarah Fay, Geoff Ramsey) listening and pulling out key insights and questions from the tables to share with the entire group. Note: These debate topics are deliberately one-sided to provoke pointed and actionable conversation.

Debate #1: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Metrics
Albert Einstein famously observed that "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Digital marketers are awash in research and drowning in data, but all those numbers don’t add up to better marketing, just better targeting for display ads that customers ignore anyway. If we want to get beyond DR, digital marketers need to focus on the art of marketing, not the science.

Debate #2: Social Media is a Distraction from Marketing
The marketing department is not the right home for a corporation’s social media strategy. That belongs to customer service, product groups, and what the author Grant McCracken calls a new “Chief Culture Officer” who works with the CMO. While marketers should get briefed on what customers are saying online and work with agencies on social media advertising, they must still focus on what they do best: craft a message and disseminate it.

Resolutions: We’ll end our Town Hall by articulating the three goals that brands, agencies, and publishers should share in order to take online branding forward.

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Presenter: Scot McLernon, President, Upstream Group, Inc.; Geoff Ramsey, CEO, Co-Founder, eMarketer; Brad Berens, Chief Content Officer & Editor at Large, iMedia & CMO Executive Summits; Sarah Fay, Summit Host

Format: PPT