I’m back in the office today after a week in New York to attend our Marketing Performance Measurement forum. We had a great turnout, about 75 marketing executives who joined us at the Thomson Financial headquarters a few blocks from Wall Street to talk about trends in marketing metrics. Jim Lenskold, author of Marketing ROI, keynoted, along with Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer.  We ran three panels featuring top marketing execs from companies like IBM, Avaya, Kodak, SAS and Factiva, covering different stages of program evolution, ending with a panel of CEOs who gave their perspective on current marketing trends.

A few quotables:

"You’ve got to be able to communicate [to the board] that Marketing is in the game, helping to move the ball. The vehicle for that communication is numbers. If you don’t have the numbers, you have no platform for communicating your value to the company."

–Bill Brewster, VP of Marketing, Konica-Minolta

"Sales is coin-operated–motivated by numbers and sales. Marketing needs to be coin-op."

–Deborah Rosen, Executive VP, Marketing – webMethods

"Don’t worry about doing it right. Instead, do it wrong fast. You’re going to do it wrong anyway,
so do it and learn, and don’t waste time worrying about trying to do it right."

–Mike Moran, Distinquished Engineer, IBM

"If you can’t track lead gen measurements through to closed sales, you just may be doing some great marketing which has no value to the company."

–James Lenskold, President, Lenskold Group

We followed up the event with a VIP dinner, and gathered 15 marketing executives around a table with a lot of wine and food to talk about marketing trends and challenges. Not too many places where you’ll see Google sitting across the table with Yahoo!, or hear the top brand executive from AT&T talk about what the brand means in a world of cable and VOIP. Lest this start to sound like the society pages, I’ll stop there.

Suffice to say the topics that have been rolling around on the street for the past three years, challenging marketers to get in the game, have engaged some of the smartest marketers around, and the dialog is getting interesting. I’ve started to schedule interviews with some of the voices that are emerging from the CMO Council membership, and I’m planning to bring those to Marketonomy in the next few weeks as podcasts.