• by Laurie Petersen , October 12, 2007

What makes a successful leader in the emerging Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010? The new study by the ANA and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton identifies a passion for consumer insights as the most critical factor.

Knowing how the consumer uses new media as a tool that integrates into their life for community and entertainment was a critical factor identified by 95% of the more than 250 senior marketers surveyed for the research, which will be presented on Saturday at ANA's Annual Meeting in Phoenix.

11 Leader Keys to Success:

Make your consumer an advocate: Shift marketing objectives from sending a message to facilitating conversations with and between consumers. Understand user-generated content and how consumers use your brand. Vest your brand with meaning. Be authentic.

Elevate media and communications: Develop an internal 'integrator' position (e.g., communications planner). Appoint senior media leadership, incorporate media early in the strategic planning process, and integrate media with marketing.

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Expand consumer insights capabilities: Leverage one-to-one consumer interactions (including ethnography) and digital channels that provide real-time behaviors and patterns. Understand how consumers use media for entertainment, community and information. Lean on partners to provide additional data and insight. Embed them across the organization.

Apply rigor: refine and iterate your marketing mix: Build partnerships with digital agencies, media agencies and media companies to track ad placement, versioning and effectiveness. Digital media brings a new level of transparency and efficiency to the optimization of the marketing mix.

Bring digital out of the back room: Digital and interactive are no longer 'niche' capabilities. They are part of the requisite skill set for all marketers. Recruit and train accordingly.

Don't stop at technology: Align the organization, hire the right talent, and initiate a progressive culture. Identify and address organizational barriers.

Learn globally: Develop structures to share best practices in new media. Watch technology patterns, social trends and consumer technology adoption rates in leading geographies.

Institutionalize experimentation and media innovation: Encourage experimentation and support ideas for incremental improvement. Formalize experimental spend efforts. At the very least, have a default budget framework such as allocating ~5% into experimental media.

Establish an increasing number of marketer, media and technology partnerships: Staff accordingly. Place bets across the media and technology landscape.

Manage complexity via partnerships: Know the difference between those capabilities to keep in-house and those better managed by external partners. Know when an idea is scaleable, or a competitive advantage, and should be resourced internally.

Question marketing models: Identify clear brand objectives, evaluate multichannel (e.g., relationships, event, in-store, email) marketing options to meet objectives, and develop business cases.