Keynote @ Folio

i will take the stage in the ballroom of the Chicago Marriott in about two hours to talk — according to the show program — about “What e-centric marketers want from magazine brands.” Instead I entitled my slides, “Geek Marketing” and open with Steve Rubel @ Edelman’s year-old definition of geek marketers as those people who straddle the worlds of marketing and technology and drive the two together into interesting and effective stuff. As usual I feel unprepared and ready to crash and burn. I don’t do well in ballroom environments, with microphones and podiums. I greatly prefer to sit on the edge of the stage, tell stories, and take questions. Standing up there for 75 minutes with a powerpoint is my idea of hell.

Folio is one of the biggest shows for the magazine industry. As a trade magazine it was best known to me as a journalist for its annual salary surveys which allowed me benchmark my compensation against other reporters and editors. This one is pretty packed, and fortunately, what what I have seen and heard, not mired in Print vs. Online 101 discussions, in fact, Time’s president and publisher, Ed McCarrick just delivered a morning keynote about the reinvention of Time as a digital property, not

At dinner last night with yesterday’s keynote speaker, Revision 3 CEO Jim Louderback (and fellow PC Week alumnus), we joked about the doom and gloom scenarios that would so easy and so glibly delivered: “run for your lives! Print is dead.” But the reality is there is hope for magazine brands in this day and age, the question is whether or not a spirit of innovation has taken hold so the magazines can start to drive the evolution of media and not react to it.

My agenda today is pretty basic:

1. What it is like to leave media for marketing?
2. What does an ecommerce focused advertiser look for from media?
3. The difference between demand generation and brand awareness online
4. The Funnel
5. The marketing dollar
6. Brand is reputation and word of mouth
7. The death of the microsite model
8. The rise of the social model
9. Our latest and most ambitious online campaign (Voices of the Summer Olympics)
10. Some advice

I’ll try to post my slides later. Until them, wish me luck and no, don’t tell me to imagine the audience in their underwear.

Author: David Churbuck

Cape Codder with an itch to write View all posts by David Churbuck