2008 CM Summit : New Brand Way
Featured Speakers
Close your eyes and imagine leafing through your favorite magazine - Vogue, perhaps. A two-page spread halts your progress - the image of a beautiful, sophisticated woman standing in the doorway of a crumbling Havana doorway, with an elegant brand - "Lancome" - etched in the lower right corner. Or perhaps it's a spread in Fortune, an arresting montage of imagery featuring a Jaguar automobile, a model you've never seen before.
Now, open your eyes, and imagine the same experience online. Having a hard time?
As marketers, we love scale, and we demand safety and quality. But somewhere along the online way, we've lost the engagement.
Brand marketers are experts at using traditional media to build demand for their brands - over the past 50 years, we've perfected the art of the engaging spread, the irresistible 30-second spot. But when it comes to online, we have yet to find our footing.
Instead, we've funded the first ten-plus years of the commercial Internet with direct response dollars, pouring "branded display" budgets into ad networks and CPC vehicles. We've tried just about everything, to be sure, and we do buy display units on our favorite sites. Yet we're often disappointed with the performance they deliver.
To paraphrase Wenda Harris Millard, Chair of the IAB, we must not trade our brands like pork bellies. Brands are not commodities, so why are we judging our online marketing by the standards of direct response? Is it, perhaps, because we can? Or, perhaps, is it because we don't know how to measure that magic that occurs between a consumer's ears when they first see the image of a beautiful woman standing in a crumbling doorway?
To keep building our brands, we have to go where the audience has gone. And every month, more than 600 million people visit conversational media sites -foreign lands when it comes to brand marketing. Or ....are they?
At the second Conversational Marketing Summit, our first in the brand capital of New York City, we'll tackle this conundrum head on with sessions covering:
- What kind of marketing works in social media?
- Which of the lessons learned from marketing in traditional media apply when the audience joins the conversation?
- Why will we pay an $80 CPM to reach women, 18-34, in Vogue, but just $3 to reach the same audience online?
- What do we make of the promised new platforms from Google, AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo?
- Are CPC networks simply harvesting the hard won brand value we've built offline?
- How does one create engagement and build brands in the context of conversational media?
- What are the online analogs to the executions we so love in magazines and television, and how do we execute them?
- Who's already doing it right, and how?
It's time to reclaim our brands online, and to declare marketers a full and fair participant in the burgeoning conversation that is the online media world. In short, it's a New Brand Way online, and it starts at the CM Summit, New York. Join us!
