Former IAB CEO Greg Stuart and Industry Analyst Emily Riley Headline Popular Digital Marketing Event

Vienna, VA– July 6, 2010 – Today, TARGUSinfo, the trusted leader in On-Demand Insight® linking billions of consumer and business attributes in real time, announced that Greg Stuart, former CEO, IAB, and Emily Riley, principal analyst and research director, Forrester Research Inc., will be this year’s keynote speakers at the annual Interactive Insights Summit, October 13-14 at the Wynn Las Vegas, NV.

Formerly known as the Online Lead Quality Summit, the Interactive Insights Summit will host a unique blend of leaders from national advertisers, lead generators, lead exchanges, interactive agencies, ad networks and ad exchanges from around the digital world.  The Interactive Insights Summit will foster networking and business opportunities between senior industry professionals and uncover emerging trends — all to help fuel business across the lead generation ecosystem.

“Last year, more than 350 senior marketing and advertising executives took part in our most successful summit yet,” said Joy Nemitz, senior vice president, market development, TARGUSinfo.  “The new name reflects the evolving conversation that is taking place in the digital world, as will agenda topics that range from best practices in analytics and scoring to the importance of lead quality, and will also include case studies involving third party data in online display advertising.”

The Interactive Insights Summit bridges the lead generation industry to preeminent digital marketing and advertising trends.  In addition to hearing from industry experts, strategically planned and executed networking events will offer valuable face time with potential partners to help drive your business.

“The industry is increasingly moving from buying mere impressions towards buying focused audiences,” said Eshwar Belani, vice president products and business development, Rocket Fuel Inc.  “Data is playing a very influential role in this transition and TARGUSinfo does an excellent job bringing together industry thought leaders to discuss the latest trends and identify opportunities for the future.”

Attendees can register now through September 17 and take advantage of the “Early Bird” pricing for
$100 off a regular full conference pass.

To register or receive more information about the Interactive Insights Summit, visit: www.TARGUSinfo.com/Summit, on Twitter at www.twitter.com/iisummit or LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3175803&trk=hb_side_g.

About TARGUSinfo

TARGUSinfo, the trusted provider of On-Demand Insight® to the most recognized brands, links and delivers more than 90 billion real-time attributes a year to drive smarter and more profitable customer interactions on the Web, over the phone and at the point of sale.  For more than a decade, Fortune 500 companies have turned to TARGUSinfo to enable improved audience targeting, better customer experiences, higher conversion rates and increased customer lifetime values by using TARGUSinfo identification, verification, scoring and location solutions. TARGUSinfo offers a complete range of solutions to help organizations make better real-time decisions leveraging patented processes built on a proprietary network of hundreds of data feeds and its unique predictive analytics capabilities.  A profitable and privately held company, TARGUSinfo is headquartered in Vienna, VA with offices in San Diego, Chicago, San Francisco and New York.  For more information, visit www.TARGUSinfo.com.

.

.

Before I get to the Day 2 recap, I gotta show you a few pics of the networking event on Day 1. It was hands down the best networking event at a conference that I have attended. Aside from the open bar and excellent appetizers, the event was accompanied by an excellent ’80′s cover band. They rocked the event out and put on a great show! Classic!

Here are a couple of photos from the iPhone. One includes my Business Development manager at Geary Interactive. lol

Day 2 started off with an interesting keynote presentation by cofounder of Flickr Stewart Butterfield. He kicked it off by presenting a hilarious click of CK Lewis on the Conan Obrian show.

The overall presentation took a look at the changing environment online and how life has evolved because it. I questioned the relavance of the presentation, because it didn’t hit me right in the face like most keynotes do, but you can draw the  conclusion that you, as a marketer, should always be looking ahead into the future to drive innovation and to take notice of the online identities people are creating.

“Using the Social Graph to Drive Acquisition” was the next session I attended. It took a deep dive into in the topic of social media and advertising. The panelists included Frank Kochenash VP of Strategy and Analytics, Razorfish, Gordon Peters VP of Business Development, Social Hour, Sean Kegelman SVP of Partnerships, Vivaki and Tim Kendall Director of Monetization, Facebook.  Here are few of my notes:

What marketing needs are being most successfully met?
Frank -  New ways and opportunities to create relationships with customers.
Gordon-  Gain insight into your audience and their attitudes. Social Media is hard to scale and potentially very expensive to run
Tim- What works well is hyper targeting on what the people are actually saying. (Sounds like contextual targeting). Recruiting works very well in social media from a cost per candidate view. The ability to advertise specific jobs to specific groups is a very good use of Facebook.

How are you measuring campaigns effectiveness?

Frank-  Measuring social media is not done very often. The ways of measuring differ greatly and is not uniform to one method. This makes it extremely difficult to realize the true success of some social media campaigns.

What is not working well in Social Media?
Tim- A Direct TV ad targeting people on FB with a goal of signing up new users did not work. There are campaigns that simply are not going to work on social media outlets and this was one of them. People targeting works well, in general, but I suggest staring with brand awareness to drive fans, then segment the fans and drive targeted ads/messaging to drive sales.

Audience Questions:

How can I use SM in the car business with a commercial intent?
Tim- The auto industry is a challenging segment. There are certain business that are not social and cars may be in the middle. Sports are very social and Direct TV may not be very social.
Sean-  Dealers know their targeted customer. Maybe simply implementing branded ads to targeted segments, rather then creating a twitter page or FB page first would be more beneficial.

Dave Zinman, VP & General Manager of Display Advertising, Yahoo! lead a great session on the future of onine advertising. While it is always difficult to predict the future Dave concluded that their are clear indicators that of where the future of online advertising is headed. While probably a little bias he speculates that the drive from a $25 Billion industry to a $50 Billion industry will come from the increased use of display ads. The ability to hyper target impressions will allow advertisers to confidently transfer more budget to the online space.

There were a number of excellent sessions that covered lead scoring and display ad targeting, but the final keynote was by Polly LaBarre, author of “Mavericks at Work” capped the day of perfectly. She recounted a number of experiances with different companies and spoke about how their corporate cultures fostered happy employees and ultimately innovation. The session, I think, left people inspired and motivated to make a difference in their company.  Overall it was a great way to end the event.

Tomorrow I will cover one last session that took place on the first day. There was simply too much info not to dedicate a single post to it.

.

.

.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Starting a conference recap post is always painful and difficult for me. I find it similar to starting a forced grade school English paper. “What I did over summer break included….”.

I am going to use that complaint to get through the into and get right into the meat and bones of the fist day at the Targus Lead Quality Summit. Overall, great show with good content and great networking. The majority of the attendees appeared to be involved in the EDU vertical in one way or another, but there also was a nice group of attendees from the finance verticals. I am going to take this week to review the sessions I attended on post at a time.

The first session that I attended took place in the Financial Track and was titled “Best Practices in Online Lead Acquisition – The Lenders’ Perspective”. The session was moderated by Owen Raun, President of RMC Vanguard and the panelists included Timothy Skinner VP at Charter One/Citizens Bank, Phil Kneibert President at Mortgage Lenders of America, Jessica Manna VP & CMO at Residential Finance Corporation.

The first topic discussed how social media fits into their marketing plans. Jessica who was the most experienced with implementing SM into her marketing strategy opened up and discussed a few details. Her strategy was to assign the different channels, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube,  to specific members on her team. Each member  is allotted an hour or two to maintain their given channel. While she said the implementation of SM in her marketing plan has opened a number of doors and has extended their brand visibility it will never likely take the place of their traditional lead generation channels.

Its not always easy to launch a SM strategy or to get the approval from the executive team, especially in the finance sector. Jessica performed a large amount of research, created and 20 page strategic plan and only then gained approval from legal and the rest of her team. According to Jessica evaluating the success of a Socia Media strategy is done by tracking the number of fans, posts, interactions, links, etc.

The group then discussed what criteria they used to evaluate a quality of a lead and lead source. Phil finds it difficult to determine the quality of a lead source right off the bat. This is probably the biggest challenge for most buyers, but he suggests acting like the a potential borrower and visiting the sources website and filling out their form. He suggests that the methods in which the leads are generated will also give a good idea of the quality of the leads. Leads from SEM typically convert better then others according to Phillip. He also claimed the longer the form the better the leads.

Timothy was asked how a large bank like Charter One efficiently integrate multiple channels. Tim suggests distributing similar leads to specific groups of CSR’s so that they don’t treat leads differently or get spoiled with higher quality leads and disregard those that don’t perform as high. He also mentioned that Charter One’s ability to cross sell different products have given them the ability to increase their ROI.

When asked what the average time it took their Loan Officers to respond to a lead the each had a different, but unfortunately similar answer.

Phil randomly takes snap shots and said they do measure but not has much as they would like.
Tim measures their speed to contact by the reviewing the time stamp of a lead and the time stamp on the first status update.
Jessica also tracks speed to contact by viewing the time stamps on the status updates. She also said the moving from the Push method to the Pull method has helped a great deal.

The unfortunately part in all this discuss was that none of the panelist actually knew the specific amount of time it takes their team to reach the leads. Speed to contact is the most important factor in achieving success with Internet leads and tracking this number should be a high priority.

Overall the session was good. I would have like to have heard more detailed information about the lead acquisition process, but I thought it was enlightening and helpful to the buyers in the room nonetheless.

.

.

.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________________________________________________________