Nancy Bhagat with Intel tackled the topic of end-to-end marketing online (a fundamental shift). Fundamentally, marketers are facing a media revolution: the increasing number of media outlets, noise and costs are compounded by time-shifting (Tivo effect).  With so many media outlets, reaching an audience is a cost-prohibitive endeavor. Nancy reminded us that there are 1 billion online participants worldwide.  A huge number to be sure.  Unfortunately, Nancy continued to share statistics that sometimes conflicted with eMarketer’s data, but certainly started to feel like information overload.  Perhaps that’s her point? I did appreciate her quote about young people trusting strangers on social networks more than marketers. Another great quote from Carat: “Great brands are no longer the ones that are the best storytellers, but the ones with the best stories being told about them.” That is a double-edged sword of course: bad stories can hurt brands exponentially more with the adoption of social media, than ever before. Nancy then went on to outline specific examples of how Intel has walked the talk, including mentioning Intel’s new policy on compensating partners up to 35% of their online marketing spend. Nancy did share a slide with maybe 20 metrics vendors, randing from hitwise for competitive tracking to BuzzLogic for conversation tracking. Her point was that she has to manage up to 250 global analytics vendors, and there is no easy way to navigate the mess. She ended her presentation by throwing down the gauntlet to service and technology providers to help navigate tools and techniques to create insights and innovate. Good thing Anvil SEM clients have us!