Communications Track
Beyond Customer Demographics: Redefining Value in the Age of Convergence

Increasing your market share – and ensuring profitable growth – requires more than just offering converged services to your customers. It means offering the experience each customer demands. You need richer new segmentation schemes that take into account an individual's social network – giving you the insights that help you provide that customer the best advertising offer, content and experience possible in this highly competitive converged digital era.

We'll explain how you can leverage customer intelligence across your organization to offer the right services, reduce churn and sustain profitable growth.

Featured presenters include:

• Disney Destinations LLC

• The Promar Group

SESSIONS

11:00 a.m.	Embracing Change, Seizing Opportunity - Salon E Thornton May, IT futurist For whatever reasons (presumably long buried and forgotten), business thinking long ago coalesced around the conclusion that change is bad and must be difficult. We need to fundamentally recalibrate this thinking. Change is natural. Humans sit atop the food chain because we are, in fact, wired for change. Every vertical market has a natural rate of change. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average was created in 1896, it included a dozen "smokestack" stocks selected on the basis of their expected staying power and representation of the economy. Of those 12, only GE remains on the index today. Likewise, of the companies that constituted the original S&P 500 in 1957, 426 (85 percent) had fallen off the list by 1997. The lesson for the general population is clear – change or disappear. The first step is to recognize that substantive change is necessary. This can be easier said than done. Consider this: Forty percent of all commercial airline crashes in the United States are due to CFIT – controlled flight into terrain. In other words, the leading cause of crashes is a team of trained pilots looking at their instrument data and refusing to accept that they are flying into the ground. Their refusal to break their frame of mind leads to disastrous consequences. When you implement a new technology or business solution, disruptions in your organization’s natural "flow" are inevitable. While challenging in the short run, the opportunities presented by disruption can be pivotal to an organization and catapult it to a new level of success. IT futurist Thornton May will explain why an interruption can allow your enterprise to realize a greater return on investment, bring a product to market faster, execute existing tasks more effectively and efficiently, and garner a greater competitive advantage.
1:45 p.m.	Building Partner Ecosystems that Increase Customer Value Christian Friege, Consultant Harry Santamäki, former Vice President, Media Industry, Nokia Inc. William Weiss, founder, Chairman and CEO, The Promar Group LLC Maximizing customer value in communications, media and entertainment requires a complete picture of how consumers use products and services. Yet no single company in the value chain has all the necessary information. This executive panel brings broad cross-industry experience and differing perspectives to help you understand the value of your customer data and how to leverage partner ecosystems for competitive advantage
3:15 p.m.	Getting the Most Value Out of Your Customers: Integrating CRM and Revenue Management Edward Gaffin, Director, Global Customer Managed Relationships Operations and Analysis, Disney Barry Smith, former Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Sabre Airline Solutions Rory Fagan, SAS, moderator In this session we will discuss the advantages of leveraging the buying behavior of your existing customer base to optimize profits before you invest resources to attract new customers. Edward Gaffin of Disney will discuss the company’s current CRM efforts, and Barry Smith, former Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Sabre, will provide his perspective on integrating customer buying behavior and revenue management efforts, with the goal of companywide profit optimization. Topics will include: How to understand your customers. The business value of leveraging customer relationships. The relationship between CRM and profit optimization. The future of revenue management and next-generation solutions.

SPEAKERS

Christian Friege
Consultant

Christian Friege was most recently the Chief Customer Officer and a Member of the Board of Debitel AG, Germany’s largest mobile virtual network operator. Prior to that, he worked for nearly 10 years with the media company Bertelsmann, building the online business for book clubs in the United States and heading up the book club business in the United Kingdom. He works now as an independent consultant, specializing in the fields of customer management, direct marketing and marketing management. He holds a master’s degree in business administration from Mannheim University and a doctoral degree in marketing from the Catholic University of Eichstaett.

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Ed Gaffin
Director, Global Customer Managed Relationships Operations and Analysis
Disney

Ed Gaffin has more than 16 years of experience in a variety of marketing analytics roles within leading companies in the fields of financial services, hospitality and retail site location consulting. He is currently responsible for the planning and execution of the direct marketing and CRM operations function for all Disney resorts worldwide. This includes modeling and analytics, campaign management, CMR program reporting and marketing database management. 

Gaffin joined Disney’s Parks and Resorts Division in 2001 as Manager, Modeling and Analytics, for the Marketing Strategy Group. In this new role, he was involved in the development of many customer-centric analytics products to further enhance the organization’s understanding of the Walt Disney World resort guest. 

Prior to joining Disney, Gaffin was Assistant Vice President, CRM, for Provident Bank in Cincinnati, where he was responsible for increasing the sales of both credit and deposit products by deploying statistical models of customer behavior. He was also involved in the development of a central marketing data mart and the deployment of teller and personal banker CRM systems within the branch banking network. Prior to that, he held marketing analytics roles with Bank One in Dayton, Ohio, and Thompson Site Selection Research in Ann Arbor, MI.

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Harry J. Santamäki 
Consultant
Sand Hill Services Inc.

Harry J. Santamäki

Harry Santamäki is a strategic change agent who has been identifying the opportunities created by new technology, new business models and new applications for more than 25 years. His experience ranges from telecom, media, content and the Internet to venture capital methodology and corporate strategy. He has been focusing on the short- to medium-term opportunities arising from convergence, while keeping in mind the users and the required business tools for concepting, fast prototyping and market testing.

Santamäki’s unique way of reading market opportunities and turning them into programs has taken him to key positions in large global organizations as well as establishing his own startups in Europe and the United States.

Santamäki was co-founder of the Nokia Corporation, where he was Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. In this role, he was involved in creating a global N-Series smart phone strategy, making global Internet deals with companies including Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, and media deals with labels, newspapers and studios. He also helped launch Nokia's game publishing efforts (including Sega) and was the catalyst for Nokia to enter the digital marketing business with mobile search and advertising.

Santamäki has recently established Sand Hill Services Inc., an international consulting company. He continues to provide the same "change agent" services that he provided at Nokia Corporation but now addresses venture capital organizations, their portfolio companies and larger companies in venture capital efforts and spin-offs.

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Barry Smith, PhD
Expert, Revenue Management and Reservation System Design

Barry Smith

Barry Smith retired from Sabre Holding as Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research in 2007. He and his teams developed new decision support applications for Sabre’s travel distribution, retailing and software lines of business. He developed many of the revenue management techniques used throughout the airline industry and pioneered the application of revenue management techniques in other industries. Smith’s team was awarded the INFORMS Edelman Prize for airline yield management; the paper describing this work was subsequently awarded the INFORMS Revenue Management and Pricing Section Prize for its impact in this area. He holds patents in reservation system design, scheduling, pricing, operations and online retailing. He also served as president of the Airline Group of the International Operational Research Societies (AGIFORS). In 2004, he was named AGIFORS Fellow.

Smith holds a doctoral degree in industrial and systems engineering from Georgia Tech, a master’s degree in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech.

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William C. Weiss
Consultant
The Promar Group

William Weiss is a renowned strategic thinker, board participant and experienced senior executive. He has been providing corporate leaders, boards and high-net-worth investors with counsel and execution assistance ­­­– utilizing his ideas and methods – for more than 30 years. 

Some of the areas Weiss focuses on include media, telecommunications, information, environmental and emerging technologies. His unique way of analyzing and accessing the business landscape offers a fresh strategic framework for understanding how technology and change can open new growth possibilities. Weiss also brings substantial experience in applying those frameworks for action.

Weiss’ clients include Discovery Communications, Ericsson, GE, IBM, Qualcomm, SAS, Steelcase and Toshiba.

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