Category: The Conversation Economy

What’s the CEO of a major advertising holding company doing at Web 2 Summit? Well, come on down and find out. Marketing dollars are the oxygen in the Internet’s bloodstream – the majority of our most celebrated startups got that way by providing marketing solutions to advertisers of all stripes. Think about it: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Groupon – all provide channels between customers and brands.

So it only seem fitting that invite a man responsible for more than $6.5 billion in marketing-driven revenues (and that’s not advertising spend, that’s revenues after spend). Michael Roth runs the Interpublic Group of Companies, which include scores of specialized agencies, from Cadreon on the automated buying side of things to McCann, Lowe, and DraftFCB. The company employs more than 40,000 people around the world.

Marketing is changing dramatically as the Internet becomes *the* medium connecting brands and consumers. It’s also a key indicator of economic health – as goes marketing spend, so goes the economy. I’ll be asking Roth about the role digital has played in his business, as well as how he sees the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook.

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For the first time in eight years, Mary Meeker will let me ask her a few questions after she does her famous market overview. Each year, Mary pushes the boundaries of how many slides she can cram into one High Order Bit, topping out at 70+ slides in ten or so minutes last year. But given her move this year from star Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley to high-profile VC, I asked if Mary might spend another ten or so minutes with us to answer a few questions. She graciously agreed.

Kleiner Perkins has focused on social and mobile in a big way over the past year, raising significant funds, investing in Twitter, Square, Spotify, Klout, Path, and many more. But the firm does much more. Mary is a sharp observer of trends in our industry, and I am looking forward to picking her brain, if only for a few minutes. Sow hat do you want to hear from her?   

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (including Paul Otellini, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others.) The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

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As usual, this year’s Web 2 Summit is packed with CEO interviews. Next up, after Pincus and Donahoe, is Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. Marc and I go way, way back – he was one of my best sources when I was a cub reporter in the 1980s (he was at Oracle, I was at a trade magazine called MacWeek). I’ve watched his career ever since, with increasing admiration and anticipation – one never knows what Marc might say next. He’s declared the end of software, the end of Microsoft, even the end of Salesforce investor and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, at least as far as his business model is concerned. (And he calls Ellison a friend!)

Benioff, one of the few marketers to found and drive a major Silicon Valley company, is a genius at both identifying and exploiting key trends, bringing them to enterprise markets with zeal and craft. Probably no single executive has done more to evangelize the cloud model of computing, and we’ll certainly be talking about that, particularly given his recent offhand comment that the cloud is passe. Salesforce is a platform and developer driven model, so we’ll touch on that, and last year the company bought a Superbowl ad, featuring will.i.am, to launch its social enterprise app called Chatter.

Given that Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer will follow Benioff on day two, I’m sure to ask his opinion of those two companies.

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Next up on the Web 2 Summit interview docket is John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay. This marks a return of sorts for eBay to the Summit stage, it’s been four years since former CEO Meg Whitman joined us. Much has changed – eBay faces significant competition in its PayPal business, and unwound its Skype acquisition, for example. It also purchased GSI Commerce, a company that might best be called a “white label Amazon.” But eBay is also a company on a mission, with its new X.commerce payment platform, a renewed focus on mobile commerce, and the addition of a Facebook executive to its Board of Directors.

Given this is Donahoe’s first Web 2 Summit interview, I’d love your input. What do you want to hear from him, and about his company?   

As an extra incentive, I’ll be picking the best three questions from these series of posts (including Pincus, Marc Benioff, Paul Otellini, Dick Costolo, Michael Dell, Dennis Crowley, Mary Meeker, Michael Roth, Steve Ballmer, James Gleick, Vic Gundotra, and Reid Hoffman, among others.) The authors of those questions will get complimentary passes to Web 2 – a more than $4000 value. So get to commenting, and thank you!

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Today kicks off my annual postings on folks I’ll be in interviewing for the Web 2 Summit. Every year I seek your input, every year you help me get smarter, and I thank you for that.

The Web 2 Summit (to which all readers of this site are invited) kicks off Oct. 17th with Mark Pincus, a fellow I’ve known for over a decade, since his days at Freeloader, Support.com, and Tribe. But Zynga has become his signature success, becoming one of the fastest growing companies of the past decade, and shorthand for “games” across the social web. Zynga filed for a much-anticipated IPO earlier this year, though as with nearly every company in the space, the market seems to have cooled since then. In late August, reports circulated that Zynga was delaying its IPO, but those were never confirmed.

I doubt Mark will answer any questions related to the IPO, given he is still in a quiet period, but there’s plenty more to talk about. Pincus got the Vanity Fair treatment in June, and he’s certainly a classic Valley character.

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