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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.

Related posts:

1. 5 things to do about Web 2.0 right now