I was invited to blog the latest ANA marketing conference on marketing accountability in Dana Point earlier this week. Due to the lack of Wifi at the conference and the launch of the 2008 Tribalization of Business Study yesterday I have not been able to get to write up some of the great points that were made at the conference. I will do so here and over at the marketing 2.0 blog over the next few days.

Bob Loidice, the President and CEO of the ANA, opened the conference with a pretty strong message to attendees - It’s Time to Reinvent Marketing. With technology having put the customer in charge, you need to think about all aspects of marketing differently - think differently about the buyer, think differently about media, manage your brand differently and think differently about your measurement platform.

It’s a message that I had not heard at a variety of other advertising conferences which I attended in the last 18 months - where most attendees and speakers were still very much in denial of the tsunami that is currently hitting marketers all over the world. Although I think I did hear Bob say that there are new tools for consumers to “receive” messages, a glitch which I’ll attribute to a lifetime of working in the advertising industry, his message was very strong and well informed.

In his welcome address he listed companies who are doing it well - including:

• GE, which developed a complete new system for marketing management
• IBM, which completely transformed itself (although I believe that would not have been possible if they had not experienced a “near death” experience)
• Google, with its Adwords business model
• Apple, with the iPod
• Toyota, with their extreme Six Sigma focus
• Burger King, where they outsourced just about all marketing to consumers
• Philips Norelco, with their clever Men Grooming campaign
• Mastercard, with their Priceless campaign
• Unilever, with Dove redefining beauty
• Best Buy, with their organizational changes that eliminated the importance of “face time”
• P&G, with their content driven pampers campaign

He also reviewed some of the depressing stats that characterize the state of marketing accountability in companies today - including the fact that 40% of marketing departments have goals that are internally focused instead of goals that are in support of corporate objectives, and that 30% have no measurement system in place whatsoever. No wonder that the marketing budgets are the first ones to go when the economy hits the skids - apparently with 60% of marketing budgets being decreased in this latest downturn.