While wearing the many different hats of MC, coordinator, wifi guy, podcast traffic cop, and many others at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, I was not able to take good notes of the great discussions that took place at the conference. Thankfully, many others did, and I will try to capture most of them here. I will also elaborate on specific sessions/discussions in future posts.
Overall I believe that we delivered against the promises that were made ahead of the Innovative Marketing Conference. We promised that it would be a conversation about the new marketing foundations that need to be built in the face of the ongoing breakdown of the old rules, and we delivered just that - only a few slideshows and one way presentations and instead many deeply insightful discussions. We also promised that this conference would be a conference about marketing as a whole – as one of the main premises for the event was that unless all aspects of marketing are tied together, marketers will fail! Here too, I believe we delivered against that promise - with many sessions focused on tying all the conversations together.
Below, the summary and associated links to interesting posts from across the blogosphere.
Day 1 - CMO Summit
We started both days with a CMO telling us what it is like to be in the trenches. The first day's keynote, delivered by Russ Klein, CMO at Burger King, was insightful and surprising for its degree of innovation. He spoke of how they started looking at Burger King as a "social brand" in order to revive it, introduced their social currency strategy and much more. You can listen to a podcast interview with Russ here, and you can find some good summaries of the speech at:
Next up was a discussion about the creation process of products and services, and the role of innovation, co-creation and many other new factors on that process. The discussion was led by David Sutherland and you can find some good summaries at:
- The Fast Company Blogjam, which has a number of entries on this session including this entry on co-creation, this one on the challenges of co-creation within and outside organizations, and this one reflecting one of the live discussion groups led by John Winsor
- Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on the co-creation discussion
- David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has a good write-up on this session
John Hagel's fabulous session on attention scarcity and what that means to brands, marketing and metrics is summarized at:
- The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on this session, including the following summary posts this one, this one and this one, this one on choosing what business you are in, this one on what it is we can learn from evangelists, and this one on how companies have to change their marketing from the 3I's to the 3A's
- David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has an excellent write-up on the session
- Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on moving from the 3I's to the 3 A's
- Mario Sundar's Marketing Nirvana, where he also has a good summary of John's session.
- Chris Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto, where he has a good summary of the session as well
- Jason Chen's Blog
Next came David Weinberger, who led a discussion on the future marketing department. Good summaries for that session can be found at:
- The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on it, including this summary, this post on whether the CEO should be the CMO, this one on the repair tools to fix the marketing department, and this one on whether a marketing department should manufacture demand
- Johnnie Moore's blog, where he summarizes one important point of David's session, how blogs are complexifying messages
Prof Bern Schmitt wrapped up the day by summarizing what we discussed that day and by attempting to tie it all back together. We have recorded this session and will post the audio transcript online shortly. For now you can listen to a podcast interview with Bernd Schmitt here..
Day 2 - Marketer's Forum
The CMO who kicked off the second day was Deepak Advani, CMO at Lenovo. He spoke of the challenges to build a new brand across national and cultural barriers and also touched on what it means when your brand comes under attack by xenophobes. You can listen to a podcast interview with Deepak here, and you can find summaries of his speech at:
- The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has a number of posts on it Including this summary of the session, this entry on innovation, and this post on where design should reside in a company
- Heath Row's Squidoo lens on a new marketing foundation
- Judy Breck's Golden Swam, where she has a good summary of that part of the speech where he talked about sponsoring a non-profit to help students with used computers
- Bill Tancer's blog at Hitwise, where he reports on the session and ads some Hitwise stats in the process
Next up was a panel discussion on models for innovation, where David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Gwen Ishmael from Decision Analysts, Tony Ullwyck from Strategyn and Paul Zarookian from AIG debated all the different angles of innovation. You can find summaries of this discussion at:
- Joseph Jaffe's Jaffejuice, where he talks about the importance of the 1 percenters...
- Heath Row's Squidoo lens on models for innovation
- The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, which has a post on this session here on innovation = creating things your customers will value
After that we had a great session on the new marketing tools that are available to marketers, which was ably moderated by Johnnie Moore, and included Kevin Lee from Did-it.com, Heidi Lehman from Third Screen Media, Max Lenderman from GMR Marketing, Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Diane Hessson from Communispace. You can find some summaries at:
A particularly hot topic - the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content - was debated in the next session. The session was moderated by David Rogers from the Center on Global Brand Leadership, and included John Hiler from Xanga, Craig Newmark from Craigslist.org, and Chris Tolles from Topix.net. Good summaries of that session can be found at:
You can also listen to a Skypecast we did on the subject ahead of the conference
I was told that you could not have a marketing conference without a session on metrics and measurement, and so we put a great session together with Max Kalehoff from BuzzMetrics, Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, and Ruth Stevens from eMarketing Strategy. Summaries of the session can be found here:
Kicking off the afternoon sessions were Larry Weber from the W2 Group and Lois Kelly from Foghound, talking about the future marketing department - a lively and provocative session to say the least - and which is summarized at:
- The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, where there are a few articles on this session (here on compensation for spreading wom, here on contributing to communities, here and here from some great quotes from the conversationhere for the answers to the 10 questions that Lois asked him, and finally here for a rough transcript of the whole session)
- Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of marketing
You can also find a podcast interview with Larry here and listen to a Skypecast that he and Lois did ahead of the conference here.
After that we had a session on the future of advertising - led by Joseph Jaffe from Jaffejuice and including Chris Hoyt from 141 Marketing, Lee Johnson from McCann, Rick Klau from Feedburner and Len Ellis, most recently with Wonderman. A set of summaries for this session can be found at:
The last session before the wrap-up was a discussion on the future of PR - which consisted of a lively panel with Neville Hobson from Nevon, Lois Kelly from FogHound, Shel Holtz from Holtz Communication + Technology, and John Moore from Brand Autopsy. A good summary for this session can be found at:
Professor Bern Schmitt then closed it all up and you can find the summary of his closing remarks at:
Other, overall conference commentary can be found at
A photo stream of the event can be found on Flickr.
You can also listen to tens of podcast interviews which Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson did during the event - including interviews with Craig Newmark from Criagslist.org, Dianne Hessan from Communispace, Max Lenderman from Axe fame, Johnnie Moore and John Winsor on co-creation, David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Eric Mankin from the Center on Enterpreneurship at the Babson University, in addition to the ones listed above with Russ Klein, Deepak Advani, Bernd Schmitt and Larry Weber.
Keep checking the site as we will be adding additional edited audio versions of the sessions in the next few of days.
[Tags: marketing event marketing conference innovation marketing conference imc corante]
Hylton Jolliffe
Francois Gossieaux
