Marketing operations professionals explored, learned, and celebrated together at the inaugural Marketing Operations & Technology Summit, held in San Diego in October 2014. From Wednesday afternoon through Friday at noon we experienced a wide variety of formats, activities, and topics — and everyone made lots of friends for continuation of the conversations. This is the first of a 3-part series highlighting this inaugural summit.
marketing operations summit

historic San Diego venue
The venue was a feast all-round — historic US Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego features gorgeous ornamentation and a chef that thrilled us at every turn. The summit topics were broader than other marketing operations (MO) conferences to-date, covering MO talent and career path, marketing capability-building, customer experience and lifetime value, organizational agility, and elevating MO to greater strategic impact, in addition to marketing technology, analytics, and alignment of sales and marketing.


Gary Katz, Marketing Operations Summit Chairman
As chair of the Summit, Gary Katz led the selection of topics and speakers, and set the tone each day with stimulating insights about the origin and direction of the MO field.


Marketing Ops Summit attendees
Attendees represented many industries, from companies such as American Automobile Association, Bristol Squibb Myers, General Mills, Hanover Insurance, Healthfirst, Illumina, Integrate, Levi Strauss, RingCentral, and others. Speakers represented At Home, Clorox, Dell, Gogo, ICW, Intel, LinkedIn, Liskow & Lewis, Netflix, Renesas, Severgy, and Unify Square.


Marketing Ops Clorox
Clorox VP of Global Brand Development, Doug Milliken, kicked off the conference with inspiring insights on creating real-time capability. He emphasized the need for shared viewpoint, frameworks, processes, change management, and training to sustain marketing capabilities.


marketing metrics panel
A panel conversation among Saad Hameed of LinkedIn, Edwin Derks of Intel, and Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing led us through the steps they took to create a marketing analytics center of excellence. Great insights were shared about its vision, business case, key functions and capabilities, best practices framework, and measures of success.


marketing ops Adrian Ott
Adrian Ott, author of The 24-Hour Customer and Exponential Influence, cited a study by Adobe saying that two-thirds of marketers think marketing has changed more in the past two years than in the past fifty years, and laid out seven hacks for achieving marketing organizational agility.


And that was accomplished just on the first afternoon! We also enjoyed small-group discussions about our top MO challenges and interests as inputs to birds-of-a-feather conversations for the following two days. The atmosphere was warm and inviting, and pretty much everyone made many friends before the day was over. Stay tuned for more highlights in this 3-part series!


See Part II and Part III of the coverage on the Marketing Operations & Technology Summit . . . and stay tuned for more in-depth reports about specific presentations.

For more information, see 10 Ways Marketing Operations Creates Value