The Demand Generation Summit 30 September, 2008

We’re really excited about an upcoming event we’re co-hosting with a bunch of like-minded partners. On November 4th we’re launching the European Demand Generation Summit in partnership with Google, Eloqua, BrightTALK and MarketOne. It’s going to be held in London at Altitude, which is on the very top floor of Millbank tower with views across London. Speakers include Amanda Jobbins, Omniture’s Neil Morgan, Jeremy Bevan from Novell and Justin Gale, a senior online marketer from HP.

So why are we doing this? Well we’re really seeing a major change in the way demand generation is moving. More importantly, the way in which prospects and customers are responding to campaigns. The fragmentation of media channels, increasing cynicism and resistance to push ‘marketing’, coupled with empowered customers who search for whatever they need and would sooner be talking to each other than vendors. OK, so this doesn’t necessarily make us marketing visionaries, but at a time when everyone’s beginning to feel the pinch (or waiting to feel it) – it makes it more of a pressing issue than it has been for the last year. Best start planning sooner rather than later.

We figured it would be a good start to gather together some experts from across the industry. Not just our fellow hosts, but some of our customers and their peers who are actually tackling some of the challenges we’re all facing… How to develop content that people want to engage with and map it to the buying cycle; how to target timely, relevant communications to someone whose name you don’t necessarily know; how to harness emerging and social media; and how to turn customers into advocates, either online or face-to-face. Then of course there’s the small matter of measuring return on all these marketing investments.

Over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to the event I’ll be picking up some of these themes and expanding on them. In the meantime you can visit the event site here. It’s open to marketers from technology and telecoms companies, B2B and B2C. A bunch of invitations should be going out in the next day or two so keep an eye on your in-tray and in-box.