PMA's Integrated Marketing Conference - Day 1

It's been a very exciting and fully packed day here in Chicago at PMA's Annual Integrated Marketing Conference. I caught a 6:40 flight out of Buffalo and arrived here at the Marriott Downtown in time to check into my room and grab a cup of coffee before the opening remarks kicked off the conference. We went pretty much non-stop all day until after the networking reception which I left at 7:30pm when it was supposed to be wrapping up, but there were still quite a few people mingling around the Grand Ballroom.

It was really good to see again some old friends (like the ladies from SCA Promotions who are the Gold Sponsors of the conference this year), a few other business acquaintances as well as to meet several new people. It appeared to me that most people here really wanted to meet you, talk with you and find out more about what you do. It did seem to be a bit smaller crowd than were at last year's conference, but maybe that's what made it feel a little more personal.

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, did kick us off as the opening keynote speaker...I wrote about his background in my previous post. He admitted that he wasn't a business expert at all and he really didn't talk to us much about marketing, but nonetheless he was very engaging as well as funny. I promised in my last post to be accountable, since accountability is the theme of this year's conference, and share with you some of Steven's insights, so here's a few on how I interrupted them.

The key message that Steven focused on during his hour with us this morning was that most of us marketers make major decisions based on what the customers say versus what they actually do. He shared with us some learnings that came out of several behavioral experiments that were conducted at the University of Chicago to find out what makes people do what they do. They resulted in different outcomes depending on if they were done in the lab vs. the real world. These showed that people's behavior can be greatly affected by their environment and the particular situation that they are put in. This has always been one of the major disadvantages of focus group research. Steven's advised us to try and build a feedback tool into everything that we do since we should not rely on that one time to give the real truth.

After Steven we were treated to Ann Hand who is the former SVP Global Brand Marketing and Innovation for BP. Ann shared with us a really great story of how this brand made an emotional connection with its customers on a global level by fulfilling its promise to make things "a little better" for them. The new Helios Power retail brand campaign was originally launched just a year ago and soon will be integral to BP's 25,000 retail locations worldwide. I asked Ann is she could share her presentation deck with me so that I can cover this story on its own, so I will follow up with her.

There were several other key learnings that were shared with us during the rest of the day that are worthy of their own post; some that I've asked for additional information. Those include speakers from The Coca-Cola Company, OfficeMax, Kraft, ConAgra Foods, 7-Eleven, Heineken USA, Interstate Bakeries (Hostess) and Yahoo.

Tomorrow we have another full day that gets started with keynote speaker Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. So, I'm going to try and get some sleep now since I've been up since 4 am EST today and really starting to fade. This has nothing to do with the fact that there was some pretty good, complimentary Shiraz wine served at the networking event (sorry I can't remember the name of the winery, but I believe its a brand from Pernod Ricard, one of the sponsors).

I hope all those people that I introduced this blog to today will visit and add their comments. I'm looking forward to hearing from you all as well as to tomorrow. Good Night...