Conference Summary
The Innovative Marketing Conference, co-produced by the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School and Corante, the world's first blog media company, took place June 8-9, 2006 at Columbia's Faculty House. The conference was comprised of a Day 1 CMO Summit, and a larger Day 2 Marketers Forum.
Speakers included Russ Klein, Burger King CMO; Deepak Advani, Lenovo CMO; Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist; and Larry Weber, former CEO of Weber Shandwick, along with many other leaders and experts in marketing and branding.
Over 120 companies attended, including AIG, American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, d/g* worldwide, Eaton, Fast Company, Harvard Business School Press, IBM, Leo Burnett, McCann, McKinsey, Mindshare, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, Novartis, Ogilvy, Pfizer, Samsung, SAP, Sapient, ClickZ, Topix, Unisys, the United Nations, and Xanga among others.
The theme of the conference was marketing innovation. Topics addressed included: attention scarcity; models for product and service innovation; the new tools of search marketing, mobile marketing and buzz marketing; the impact of online marketing and consumer generated content on brands; metrics, ROI and measurement; and the changing role of the marketing department, and of advertising and PR agencies.
In addition to two days of live interactions, various forms of interactive media were used to disseminate the conference's content before, during and after the event, including: a series of four pre-conference Skypecasts; live blogging during and after the conference, on FastCompany.com, Forbes Innovation Blog, and many others; and podcasts of interviews with conference speakers and thought leaders.
Click below for in-depth online content from the conference: