The ANA B2B Brand Conference Report, Part 1

I just got back from yesterday's ANA conference. Some great panels and presentations with a solid mix of corporate marketers, agencies, consulting firms, and an academic.  Some of the highlights:

• A particularly good case study on how to build an integrated marketing campaign with just a whiteboard and a brown marketer. I might blog on this in more detail next week. 
• I randomly sat next to Robert DellaCamera, KLA-Tencor's Senior Corporate Communications Manager, at breakfast.  He's coincidentally a satisfied user of MarketingCentral, an on-demand Marketing Resource Management vendor that Unica purchased last month.
• Paraphrasing some practical account-based marketing advice courtesy of Rick Segal of HSR Business to Business: Obviously 'account-based marketing works better than spray and pray...but it's the politics, not technology, that gets in the way' of success.
• Some interesting stats as it relates to new media courtesy of Guideline Research:  while the average estimated 2007 increase in new media spending is 11.5%, inability to prove ROI (ever hear that one before?) and lack of experience are the main barriers to adoption.
• While we're talking about ROI, there were a few challenges for marketers to measure results more holistically -- "you don't pull up a plant to measure each root to see if your plant is growing".
• Lastly, Ellis Booker helped remind us all we're getting older.  To combat lack of experience with new media he strongly suggests today's B2B CMO hire a really, really young person to understand what's possible with new media platforms like Second Life.

I touched on a just a few of the highlights, so if you were there, please take a few moments and share your thoughts.

Comments

[Charles]

Hi BJ,

Thanks for the insights into this.

I can't agree with Ellis Booker, youthfulness doesn't replace experience AND I being young(ish) [35] myself, I have seen many time a young buck (16-27) get all so excited about a technology, website, fad and believes it so much that they can't step back to see the reality of the situation.

Case in point, Second Life! The company just took a blow from advertising being pulled; cost of creating a 3D advertisement versus the return either on impressions or click-through is VERY expensive and this isn't even against ROI! That doesn't mean that Second Life is going to close down, it just isn't anywhere close to start investing marketing money into. It been around, four years, so if you listened to one of those young bucks, you would have very little to show for any type of marketing money invested into it versus AdWord, Banners, SEO, Secondary Sites, an Online Marketing Specialist, etc.

I think staying on-top of the trend is a matter of many late nights reading blogs, forums, post, etc. of younger generations and seeing what is "cool", but then again, we can simply as our children, "So any cool new sites/techknology you heard about at school today?" And even then we need to step back and think about what experience has taught us, look at the reality of it and ask ourselves, does it really make sense to invest in this?

Regards,
Charles

[Andrew Hally]

I think we as marketers are always looking for that "new thing" because it has become so difficult to cut through clutter. We want that silver bullet that would obviate the need to do the tough, nitty-gritty work of understanding our customers deeply and targeting them pricisely and testing and learning etc. That, plus media's interest in new topics that help drive readership. At this point, it would be hard to ignore the Second Lifes of the world even if we tried hard to!