Finding Our Center: Marketing From 30,000 Feet For 2012, Federated Media Publishing’s acclaimed conference series will focus on clarity and comprehension. Digital marketing is well into its second decade, yet the most common refrain amongst its practitioners is one of confusion. A dizzying pace of innovation coupled with a lack of clear metrics, goals, and process has left most of us scrambling to prove what we know in our gut to be true: That joining the digital conversation is crucial to our brands, our customers, and ultimately, to the success of our businesses. Digital marketing may seem a kaleidoscope of startups, technology platforms, and conversational media, but it won’t always be so. A topography is emerging, one defined by both practice and process. It’s time to find our center as an industry. This year’s conference series will focus on identifying patterns across our digital landscape, from location services to programmatic buying, metrics and analytics to the management of marketing data. Signal 2012 will also focus on the fundamental shift in the role of marketing as a function inside the world’s largest corporations. The AMA defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” But the grandfather of modern business theory Peter Drucker puts it much more succinctly: “Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of business.” If this is the case, then why don’t all businesses place marketing at the center of their organization? At Federated Media Publishing, we believe the shift to digital augurs such a transformation, one that requires time, experimentation, careful measurement, and learning. The goal of our conference series is to curate and narrate the insights of this journey. Join us in 2012 as we pull back to “The Thirty Thousand Foot View.” Read on for the themes and cities for 2012′s Signal Series. 
The Yin and Yang of Audience: Platforms and The Independent Web
San Francisco (March 21 @ the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio)
This conference will feature top executives from the key “dependent” platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. These services are where audiences discover new content and services with which to engage. But it’s out on the “Independent Web” that people engage with unique, community-driven content. How can marketers capture the value of both sides of the web?
CM Summit: The 30,000-Foot View
New York (May 14-15 @ Skylight Soho)
Our annual Conversational Marketing Summit brings together brands, marketers, platforms, media, and content creators for two days of high-impact content, conversations, and insights.
The View from The Consumer
Detroit (July 11, 2012 @ the Westin Book Cadillac Hotel)
Our first ever Detroit conference will focus on brands and consumer insights as they relate to the new ecosystem of mobile, local, social and real time digital services. How are customers adapting to and consuming the web? What trends can we divine, and what new services do we need to be on the lookout for?
Mapping Marketing’s Technology and Data Flows
Chicago (September 11, 2012)
The promise of digital has always been the ability to understand how your marketing is working. That promise is starting to bear fruit through the mass of new data and tools now available. This event will help marketers identify and decode the processes, companies, and partnerships that must be leveraged in the new ecosystem of technology and data platforms.
Marketing and Its Contents
Los Angeles (November 13, 2012 @ SLS Hotel, Beverly Hills)
“Content marketing” is the new black as brands become publishers, and media companies are testing new models for distribution. Join us as we try to make sense of such this crowded field through launches and lessons from innovative startups, brand case studies, and industry best practices.
