The Argyle CMO Forum in New York was fascinating  The audience was comprised of 150 CMOs and other top level marketing and communications executives.  I was, by far, the least famous presenter.  Richard Pilnik, Group VP ad CMO from Eli Lilly & Co., Ken Keller, EVP and CMO from Motorola, and Maryam Banikarum, CMO for Univision Communications were the keynote speakers and made great presentations that talked to the current challenges facing marketers and provided some glimpses of where they are heading in the future. I'll try to obtain copies of their presentations and share them with you.

I was joined by Pete Wengryn (CEO of VMS), Tom Stein (President of Stein Rogan + Partners), Bonnie Carlson (President of the Promotional Marketing Association), and Tom Collinger (Associate Dean of Medill's Integrated Marketing Communications program at Northwestern). We presented some preliminary data on how news coverage impacts business outcomes directly, but also exerts significant influence on the effectiveness of paid advertising. You'll hear lots more on this in future posts as we refine our data.

Tom Collinger was great and had the very best sound bite..."AND."  We are in a world where it is not PR or advertising, not qualitative or quantitative, not traditional media or new media, but PR AND advertising, qualitative AND quantitative, traditional media AND new media. 

While there were lots of insights from impressive speakers, Collinger's was the simplest and most straightforward. AND is the future. Three little letters. Easy to remember.