June 2019 Seller Forum

Through his work at the Annenberg School and the USC Internet Project, Jeff Cole has been watching the digital disruption of media, marketing, entertainment and consumer behavior closer and longer than anyone. If you’ve seen him speak, it’s likely been from the darkened audience at a major conference. In this intimate, close up presentation, you’ll hear from — and interact with — a legendary analyst and strategic thinker and learn to spot the winners, losers and new ideas of the next cycle.

The most vital resource and biggest open business issue in our industry is always talent. Companies don’t stop growing, good people will change companies, and we need proactive strategies and practices to keep the talent pipeline moving. So why can’t we get this right? In this hands-on working discussion, we’ll go inside the operation and examine the steps, questions, players and patterns that make for a great process. Participants will come away with a blueprint for reinventing their own hiring approach and that of their companies.

What do you call a full-service agency that eschews RFPs and reunites creative and media through the lens of culture? You’d call it Giant Spoon, one of the hottest shops in the industry. In this candid conversation, Partner Laura Correnti — who also hosts the highly-acclaimed Adlandia podcast — tells us what’s working, what’s ahead and how to crack the code of working with non-conformist agencies.

Want to know how much others are paying a seasoned rep at goal? How about performance vs. goal for last quarter and confidence in next? We’ve been anonymously collecting this data and more for well over a decade, and as a Seller Forum attendee you’ll be among the first to see the latest numbers. You won’t want to meet with your CEO without having this data at your fingertips.

Marketers asserting greater control over the strategy, execution and technical support of their digital advertising is a hard trend in our business. A historic global brand, Bayer Consumer Health, has been an early and vocal advocate for In-Housing, and has set the pace for others. In this intimate conversation, we learn what it takes for media providers to engage fully and directly with client-direct media professionals.

Unqualified prospects, unprepared first meetings, slow response times, bureaucratic glitches in fielding proposals; these are just some of the reasons why the digital sales cycle is out of control. In this focused, highly-interactive working session, we’ll address the issues and build real action plans for a tighter, more intentional sales cycle. Because getting out of our own way is often the most important first step.

In his work with over a hundred digital sales organizations in the past five years, Upstream Group CEO and Seller Forum Host Doug Weaver has seen the behavior patterns and assumptions that sabotage sales teams as they try to keep pace with a fast-changing market. In this provocative overview, he identifies and offers fixes for many of the moments that change deals, companies and careers.

Publishers and agencies have one very big thing in common: at a time of increasing marketer consolidation with, and reliance on, the dominant platforms, they both need updated playbooks. In a closed-door throwback to the freewheeling industry town hall discussions of the early 2000s, we’ve invited top sales leaders and industry execs to answer the question What Now? and discuss plans and models for thriving in the platform age. We’ve saved the best for last, so enjoy an early beverage, have your say, and hear bold ideas from many of the industry’s brightest lights.

Our closing segment flows seamlessly into our on-site cocktail and networking time just outside our meeting space at Reuters.