New York Digital Collective
December 19, 2012 | The Bowery Hotel

In just four years Gilt Groupe has successfully transitioned e-commerce into the world of entertainment and gaming.  The company has built a brand online and attracted loyal customers by establishing appointment shopping.  Over the last year Gilt has started to combine commerce with editorial through new ventures like Gilt Taste and Park & Bond, but has remained true to the cornerstone of Gilt: curation.
 
In this session, Susan Lyne, Chairman of Gilt Groupe, will discuss what this new model means to marketers.  Lyne will provide insight on how Gilt is staying relevant with consumers in this changing media landscape.

It is mind blowing to realize how much marketing has changed in the last decade and how incredibly data-driven an organization can be when it comes to digital marketing. No more sampling a tiny subset of the populace to extrapolate viewership of a program. No more guessing what creative, image, offer, or product will connect with your customers. No more creating strategy in a vacuum.

The web empowers you to take risk, learn from your mistakes quickly, unearth your competitor's strengths and weaknesses, listen to your customers and understand their behavior like never before.

In this session Avinash Kaushik hopes to inspire you, change the way you think about online data and set you up to achieve your next promotion two years ahead of schedule by revolutionizing your company's digital existence.

In recent decades past, mass communications and mass travel started to make the world a smaller place, and a new imperative arose for the marketers of global brands to create a consistent brand image across borders.  Yet even more recently, the digital age and its requirements to be real time, social and content-driven have layered on a new and seemingly conflicting imperative to be local in approach, as a basis for relevancy.  Whereas once this simply meant language translations of an ad, today, this raises all sorts of issues around local market community management, digital media campaign creation, measurement, and much more. 

This discussion will foster sharing on the strategies, organizational processes, channel nuances and exemplary creative solutions that can help us enable brands to best tackle this "global/local conundrum"... and effectively build global brand equity while delivering on consumers' expectations today for meaningful relationships with brands... no matter where they live.

Remember the Browser Wars of the 1990's? That's nothing compared to what we have today: iOS, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, mobile web, desktop web, desktop apps. This is not even considering RIM as a platform. Or Windows Phone. Or, heaven help us, emerging connected TV platforms!

In short, a digital publishing or marketing organization now needs to balance several distinct platforms, feature sets and form factors in building a ubiquitous digital presence. How does a brand manage its presence across these platforms? From advertising to apps to web content deployment, this discussion will bring us together to share our experiences and start building a common set of best practices for navigating the Splinternet.

The chasm that once separated B2B digital marketers from their consumer facing counterparts is fading fast"¦if it ever existed in the first place!  

Creating and curating highly engaging content is relevant to all digital marketers, but how do you drive growth and build trust in an incredibly complex business with many professional offerings?  Despite being in several highly regulated industries, the digital team at GE is using cutting edge new media platforms, stunning content and fan-based acquisition techniques to connect with their critical audiences.

We will highlight some of these techniques to help B2B marketers unmask the tents of transparency, micro-relevancy and context.

It wasn't too long ago when advertisers would just market on soap operas to reach moms, cartoons for kids and sports for men.  Now with more than 700 million people on Facebook, two billion video views on YouTube daily, brand sites with millions of uniques per month and search expected to be a $61B industry by 2016, as the scale of digital channels rise, the ability to target the right audience becomes more fragmented, expensive and diluted.  

How can brands that focus on a specialty audience, like kids, teens, moms, ethnic groups or specific age demos, find the right channels that not only reach, but also deliver business results and customers?  Targeting audiences is becoming more and more like a math algorithm with multiple variables and various results.  This session will focus on how brands are approaching the issue of targeting specific audience groups and dealing with all the digital opportunities available to them.

Now that we have established communities within social media, how do we optimize an effective campaign? Most sophisticated companies find themselves past the point of creation and focusing on managing, testing and analyzing. What's next?

Success = ROI. We don't create communities online just for fun... our objective is to find true consumer engagement in order to lead to more sales.  In this discussion group, we will talk about effective ways to navigate the cycle, conversion rates and metrics of social media.

The decade long rumor that mobile marketing would rule the world in 2011 is coming to an end. After years of disbelief and growing pains, when will the days of mobile maturity finally arrive?

At the same time, our consumers are connected 24-7, and are spending an astonishing number of hours with mobile engagement each day. When it seems that our consumers are at our fingertips, why are they slipping away?

In this session, we'll try to uncover the reasons why mobile is not yet the force of nature we think it should be, and discuss the challenges and limitations that exist in the current mobile marketing landscape.  Is it better data? Bigger, better ad units? The headaches of multiple carriers? We'll explore some real solutions and prioritize those for action.

In his session, Gary Vaynerchuk teaches entrepreneurs how to take advantage of the current business environment, while also preparing them to succeed as it changes and evolves into what he's termed "The Thank You Economy." With the rise of the Internet and the power of the common consumer, businesses must look backwards and scale the caring their grandparents' businesses exhibited towards their customers, or watch the competition pass them by. Today, individuals and brands that out-care and out-love their competition -- those emphasizing quality, value, responsiveness, and attention to detail, among other essentials -- see the biggest returns.

Gone are the days when a blizzard of marketing dollars could be used to overwhelm the airwaves, shut out the competition, and grab customer awareness. Now customers' demands for authenticity, originality, creativity, honesty, and good intent have made it necessary for companies and brands to revert to a level of customer service rarely seen since our great-grandparents' day, when business owners often knew their customers personally, and gave them individual attention.

Vaynerchuk discusses the incredible tool that allows brands to show customers that they care: social media. Social media offers brands the opportunity to listen to and engage with, not only their customers, but anyone having a conversation on these networks. Brands are able to take part in the necessary one-on-one conversations and interactions that show a consumer that they are important. We are on the verge of the humanization of business and victories will only be measured in how much a brand cares about its customers.