"In essence, you flip the funnel," said Cammie Dunaway, chief marketing officer of Yahoo, whose "Consumer 2.0" presentation on Saturday, seemed to epitomize the underlying theme.

The new consumer, she said, has "infinite choices - all available on demand" and "more power" than any of the more than 1,000 marketing, agency and media executives who were in attendance.

Dunnaway invoked an old refrain, calling this new version of consumers "king," and said the marketing power shift required marketers to treat each one of them regally.

"If you have 5 million individual consumers then you have 5 million individual kings that each need to be marketed to."

Other marketers, including Procter & Gamble chairman-CEO A.G. Lafley referred to them as "boss," while his Chief Marketing Officer Jim Stengel characterized them simply as "people."

Whatever they called them, marketers said the new consumer is now either controls, or "co-creates" the marketing process.

The marketers may have agreed on who controls the new marketing process, but they had different perspectives on what they should do about it.

P&G's Lafley suggested somewhat impractically "letting go," though he gave some fine examples of how P&G is reorienting its brands from a mass marketer's perspective to that of its end users.

Yahoo's Dunaway, not surprisingly, suggested the solution was to be found online, and offered four "pillars" for marketing the 2.0 consumer that coincidentally are four of Yahoo's primary features:

* Search
* Content
* Community
* Personalization

She also revealed some new Yahoo projects that expand the level of personalization, including the "world's first digital time capsule" - a collection of videos, songs, photos and other content gathered from Yahoo members that will be beamed with laser beams during an event at Mexico's Temple of the Sun and then "blasted off into outer space."

Back down on planet earth, other CMOs acknowledged that the world has changed and so has the way they approach consumers. For Sony Electronics CMO Michael Fasulo and his marketing team, it means having a "conversation" with the consumer. Fasulo, Sony Corporate Marketing Director Chris Fawcett and Brad Brinegar, chairman-CEO, of Sony's ad shop McKinney, took the crowd through that dialogue, showing how Sony first spoke to consumers and electronics retailers to figure out how to crack the burgeoning flat-panel TV market. The result was a campaign that sent two separate but simultaneous messages to male and female consumers to market "The world's first TV for men and women," Sony's new Bravia flat-panel HDTV.

Sony, which was late to enter the flat-panel market went from an-also ran to the market-leader in the flat-panel category, after having the "conversation" and launching the campaign.

The Sony presentation was the clearest example of the co-creation process that underscored the theme of the conference. And while P&G's Lafley didn't exactly articulate how 2.0 marketers should actually "let go," his sound bite was immediately embraced by trade publications as the industry's new rallying cry.

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