iMedia Brand Summit: Day 2

Another day of informative sessions, networking and tweeting at the iMedia Brand Summit.  Easily the best conference I’ve attending in a LONG TIME.

The day kicked off with a unique debate session entitled, “Debating the Vital Questions of the Digital Marketing Age”.  In this session, we were all assigned to tables and a topic would be thrown out that the table would then debate.  Have to say it was a new way to get the audience engaged, and for the most part it worked.

I won’t go through the back-and-forth of the debates, but the question that had the most discussion was: Has the agency lost its special place at the Strategic Table with the client (just one of many players) -OR- is the agency strategic relationship still on solid ground? If you have thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them.

There were some other sessions that were thought provoking (one on Social Media and one on Brand Demand), but for me the best presentation of the event was by Rob Norman of GroupM.  Some of his finer points:

• Advertising is not only useful but essential, and will continue to be
• Social relevance is an under-appreciated yet critical part of understanding how to attack social media
• Perhaps more than anything, Google’s biggest impact might be that it moved media into the Cost of Goods sold line of P&L’s (BRILLIANT observation here)
• Corporations should build assets in the social space to mitigate crisis’s before they happen

Then there was the after-party but as they say, what happens at the Broadmoor…

All in all this was a terrific event and I can’t wait to attend the next one.  Thanks to iMedia for putting this all together.