Time and Location
8:00AM - 3:00PM
Portland Art Museum
1219 SW Park Ave. Portland, OR 97205

Nontraditional Marketing Goes Mainstream:

Amidst the cacophony of 5,000 messages a day screaming at every consumer, what does it take to be heard? To be meaningful. Memorable. Resonant.

Some might say it’s the quiet voice, the one that you didn’t expect to hear. The voice that speaks to you, not at you. That speaks to the part of you that still believes that even a business can kick through the box and inspire.

At Forward 08, you’ll hear from Andy Sernovitz on how to turn one voice into a sea of harmonious voices; Mrinal Desai- who will share how what started out as a whisper at LinkedIn turned into a fervent roar; and panelists who disassembled, reinvented (with duct-tape), broke free from and skateboarded over the box. As you leave the conference, ask yourself -What will you do with your box when you’re done with it?

Whenever there’s been an innovation in marketing, Andy Sernovitz has been there. An 18-year veteran of the interactive marketing business, Andy has spent years helping companies learn how to do better marketing.

Andy teaches word of mouth marketing at Northwestern, taught Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business, ran a business incubator, and started half a dozen companies. GasPedal, his consulting company, advises great brands like TiVo, Dell, Ralph Lauren, Sprint, and Kimberly-Clark.

He created the Word of Mouth Marketing Association around the latest revolutions in blogs, buzz, and word of mouth. Andy writes an amazing newsletter and blog called “Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That” and is author of the new book “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.”

www.damniwish.com and www.wordofmouthbook.com

Word of Mouth Marketing in 5 Simple Steps
You've heard the talk, you've heard the hype -- word of mouth marketing is the next big thing.  But what exactly should you do to create a word of mouth marketing campaign for your company?  Learn specific strategies to engage with consumers and generate positive word of mouth about your brand.  Learn the 5 steps to starting an impactful, effective, sales-driving campaign.  We're going to get specific here:  Who to hire, where to start, and how to make it successful.

Mrinal is responsible for enhancing the discovery of CrossLoop, brand management, partnerships, product marketing and development, mainstream and social media communications and relationships. He has been instrumental in growing the user base of CrossLoop from scratch across 190+ countries with over 27M minutes of desktop sharing by users in a little over a year.

Prior to this, he was a Business Development executive at LinkedIn. At LinkedIn, the world’s largest and most effective business network, he helped grow the user base from 1.5M users to 6.5M in less than 2 years. He also successfully packaged, launched and drove adoption of LinkedIn's first premium products - Job Listings and Premium Accounts - into the leading Fortune 500 companies like Google, eBay, Vivendi Universal, Expedia and The Standard Insurance to name a few. Mrinal holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology in India and an MBA from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey. You can check out what Mrinal’s talking about at http://mrinal.vox.com/.

Forward o8’s panel discussion will focus on new frontiers in marketing. The move to connect with the customer on a more personal, experiential level through their passions. The notion that maybe consumers don’t want to have to ask for the facts, they want the information at their fingertips when they need it. The perfect storm of combining good old fashioned brand loyalty with the speakerbox of the web. The dawning realization that our customers are mobile and, maybe our marketing should be too.

Cody was raised by counter-culture hippies in the hills of Northern California. He doesn’t really know how he got from there to where he is today, but he’s enjoyed the ride. He received his BFA in Film/Television from New York University then spent a year in Mexico playing percussion in a band of gypsies. That’s true. He began his “professional career” in 1999 when he accepted a job in the mailroom at adidas. He was soon working for adidas at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and is currently busy preparing for the 2008 Beijing Games. Between stints at adidas, Cody worked for Red Bull Energy Drink here in Portland as a Field Marketing Manager. He was responsible for introducing the sugary elixir to all Oregonians, and considers his greatest achievement the very successful Red Bull Flugtag of 2004. He loved that time, but is thrilled to be back at adidas where he handles duties for both Skateboarding and Olympic Sports.

Jason has been a retail designer and visual merchant for more than 20 years. He’s worked for many of the largest retail and product brands in the US including Blockbuster, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, Virgin, T-Mobile, Verizon, Levi’s and Proctor & Gamble. Jason has been a principal at MTI since 2001. MTI pioneered the practice of taking products out of “product jail” (display cases) and allowing shoppers to engage with them. Today MTI is one of the largest and best known firms in the interactive merchandising space.

Organized pack rat, born in Lander Wyoming 1979, lives Downtown Portland, often walks to work, content developer, guacamole is religion, time capsules and collects things, anxiety, nostalgia, don’t like grammar, broke his shin in High School, Marketing Degree Portland State University, paid his way through college by hand making and selling nearly 30,000 Wallets, loves flowers, loves clouds, loves Portland bridges, loves big family, friends, influence for design: architecture, fond childhood memories, music, crafts, technology, thinking, etc.

At PMG, it’s rare that opportunity knocks. That’s because Brian usually opens the door before it can. Known for his big, blue-sky thinking and ability to upend conventional strategy, he repeatedly finds opportunity where it’s least expected.

Brian’s path to PMG started at the University of Texas where he graduated with a BBA in Marketing. He then moved on to Dow Chemical’s marketing department for a few years then into account services at Ogilvy & Mather. His final stop was at AT&T Wireless for eleven years, where he pioneered mobile marketing programs with partners like MTV, Disney, and the NFL, among other feats. Brian has been involved in the evolution of wireless from analog to digital, from primarily a voice centric device to a convergent tool and from a business to business luxury item to a consumer necessity. True to form, Brian saw an opportunity to build a dynamic, wireless marketing organization at the nexus of divergent business needs and an emerging, mobile marketplace. Thus, PMG was hatched.

Five-time Emmy-winner Sheila Hamilton began her convergent reporting career in documentary film before producing and reporting two-decades of investigative news for such television stations as Portland’s KATU and Salt Lake City’s KTVR. She authors the popular “Writing for Radio and Television” e-newsletter and teaches convergence journalism to seasoned reporters looking to move from print to radio or television. Sheila is the news director and afternoon show co-host at KINK. She also produces Subject Earth, Homepage, Speaking Freely.