2008 CM Summit SF

2008 CM Summit SF: New Brand Way
October 15-16, 2008
Golden Gate Club, The Presidio
San Francisco, CA

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 continues at the CM Summit, San Francisco.

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 CM Summit, San Francisco, we'll tackle this conundrum head on. Join us!

Sponsor Opportunities
2008 CMSummit SF Sponsor Overview
For more sponsorship details contact Paige Thomas – 415-332-6955 x 161