Tyler Durbin, Marketing Manager

About the speaker:

Daniel is a 26 year old technologist who started his first company 1997 at the age of 14. Currently he is the CEO and founder of Spotify, a legal music service that helps people discover, browse and play music. Daniel has also founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler, as well as been a part of the nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay).

Follow Daniel on Twitter: @eldsjal

Tweets and conversation around Daniel Ek’s, CEO and founder of Spotify, presentation to Ad Age Digital about how brands using music and Spotify as a platform, not a service.

About the speaker:

Randall Brown has been bring innovation in marketing to Gatorade for nearly 10 years now. Today, as Senior Brand Manager for digital, social and marketing innovation, Randall leads Gatorade brand strategy and planning across all digital and online platforms including advertising, branded & custom content, social media, search & SEO, measurement & analytics and gaming.

Follow Randall on Twitter: @RandallB3

In 2010, 500K consumers were connected with the Gatorade brand. Unfortunately, these were not their core audience. More times than not, the conversation happening in social media around Gatorade looked something like: “Ahhh…it’s Monday and I’m hungover. Orange Gatorade, please.” <– Not Ideal!

Today, the Gatorade brand is connected with nearly 5M people…many of which are core athletes that use their products everyday. How did Gatorade in such a short period of time use social media to grow their brand? It was a very purposeful effort with a few key stages:

Define Social Purpose & Brand Behaviors

Your social purpose must equal your brand purpose. What is it that your brand is about and how can the brand portray that purpose? At Gatorade, their purpose is to drive athletic performance from the inside out. That means helping their core audience understand what should be put into their body, why, and the effect it will have on their performance.

The rest is simple…Brand Purpose = Social Purpose.

Living Your Ethos Daily

How does the brand’s social team go about planning and executing a systematic approach to engagement? What actions must happen everyday to live the brand. As individuals, when we wake up each morning we know what we are going to do. It’s intuitive whether it is scheduled out or not. The brand purpose must be that intuitive. From there, brand managers must figure out how to scale and operationalize the brand’s social acitivities?

Purposeful Experimentation & Measurement

Remember 6th grade science? Remember the scientific method?

1. Form hypothesis
2. Define your variable
3. Test and experiment

Social media works the same way. We can formulate hypothesis about how consumers will respond to specific brand behaviors, define variables that could alter actions, and then continue to test and experiment to optimize the results.

Randall shared the 2-pronged approach Gatorade uses to track brand behaviors:

1) Tracking your inputs

Quantify the scale and qulaity of your behaviors in the social landscape.

2) Tracking your outcomes

Quantify the scale and quality of your outomces impact with customers.

From there, we can understand the value and ROI from a multi-dimensional perspective:

• as “media”
• as an insights tool
• as a brand equity builder
• as a sales tool

Final Thought

Social media is indeed a new place. But, people haven’t evolved over the last 50 years, we are all fundamentally the same over time. If you are able define your brand’s purpose while still keeping the same understanding of people, everything else falls into place.

About the speaker:

Mark Mahaney is the Internet Analyst at Citigroup Investment Research. For the past two years, Mark has been ranked #2 in the Greenwich Institutional Investor Poll for the Internet sector and ranked as Runner Up in the Institutional Investor Annual Poll for the Internet sector. He’s a big shot and always right on top of what’s next.

1. The Rise of All Things Mobile

Google: mobile advertising made up 6% of Google’s total revenue in 2011. That number is expected to hit 10% in 2012.

Amazon: Roughly $2B to $4B in sales via mobile devices in 2011.

eBay: Generated $4B in mobile (up 100%)

Priceline: Disclosed 270% growth in hotel bookings with 99% booked for same-day check-ins through mobile.

2. The Rise of All Things Social

3. The Rise of All Things Local

The internet makes local very attractive but it’s a very hard thing to accomplish. It takes a lot of troops on the ground but we will see companies like Groupon to continue to make (lots of) money in this space.

4. Online Mitigation of TV/Video Advertising

Traditional advertising has always dominated ad budgets. In 2012, we’ll see digital continue to overtake other channels (including TV). TV Viewership will begin a major drop-off in 2912 as people increasingly substitute internet content for TV content.

5. The Rise of Online Gaming

6. The Rise of Cloud Computing

Rise of the cloud is a huge opportunity fueling big venture capital investment. Young people who are native to digital have been very effective in identifying trends and opportunity for new tools and companies but watch out for the “19-yr-old risk”…are college kids equipped to lead?

7. The Rise of Mobile Payments

8. The “Hardware-ization” of the Internet

Who would have ever thought that Amazon and Google would get into the hardware game? But we are seeing it happening with Kindles, Nooks, etc.

9. Increasing Merger & Acquisition Momentum

Companies are showing an increasing willingness to utilize merger and acquisitions to achieve growth. The volume of M&A’s

10. Robust IPO Market

Hulu, Twitter, Zillow? Who is next? Most of the the 2011 IPOs were advertising/media companies. Interesting…

Did we miss a really nice tidbit from Mark’s talk? Help us fill in the blanks in the comments below and we’ll make your additions to the list and link back to you. :)