• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, October 4, 2010

If Saul Steinberg, the late cartoonist and frequent cover artist of The New Yorker magazine had drawn a map of the digital media world, it would no doubt point east from Northern California's Silicon Valley with two prominent destinations - New York's Silicon Alley and Massachusetts' Route 128 - looming large in the background. The digital media world, of course, is more a state of mind, than physical states located on a map, but the truth is that the media industry often overlooks Massachusetts' tech hub when discussing its major epicenters, despite the fact that the area surrounding Boston has one of the highest concentrations of digital technology firms, venture capitalists, digital marketers, agencies, and of course, leading academic institutions, of any market in the world.

Part of the problem, says Sarah Fay, the former head of Aegis Media North America, and a native Bostonian, is the culture of Massachusetts' tech community, which historically has been insular, clubby, and not prone to self-promotion. "We're all New Englanders, and that means we tend to be humble and don't like to boast about what's going on here" says Fay, who says that will begin to change this week when the community kicks off a week-long series of events focused on digital technology and the future of marketing.

Dubbed FutureM, the series was modeled after New York's Internet Week and just-ended Advertising Week, and is the brainchild of MITX (sounds like "my text" and stands for the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange), a group that that launched in 1996 as a place where Boston's tech community could network.

"Our members said, enough already, we've been too quiet for too long, and it's time to let people outside the market know what's going on here," says Fay, who is a member of MITX's board, and has been helping its President Kiki Mills jumpstart FutureM.

"We've always tried to shout out as a stat about the diverse ecosystem that is up here - the venture capital firms, the rich university system, the design and user experience community, the technology companies, the marketing services companies - alll these different inputs that are happening here," says Mills, who will kick the week off Tuesday with an opening event that will be followed by 51 other events hosted by a wide range of organizations that are expected to attract 4,000 attendees. Among the anchor tenants producing events during FutureM, is MediaPost, the publisher of Online Media Daily, and Marketing Daily, which is hosting CHANGE: The Digital Transformation Summit, which is being chaired by consultant and marketing renegade Julie Roehm, and will feature two-days of case studies by marketers showing how they are leveraging digital technology to change the way they market to consumers.

That's an impressive start for something that was conceived earlier this year, but didn't actually launch until June, and while it will still be largely regional in focus, Mills hopes FutureM will become the kind of regional destination that attracts national, indeed global, attention the way New York's Advertising Week, or Austin's SXSW do.

What differentiates FutureM from all the others, she says, is that it is focused squarely on the future of marketing, not just media and advertising. Among the subjects that will be explored in that context, she says, are social media, branding, customer experience, strategy, and others.