PALO ALTO, Calif. (Nov. 16, 2010) –Anticipating, pre-empting, containing and recovering from a crisis, security breach, product recall, or operational failure is now an essential cross-functional discipline and contingency planning priority for global businesses.

During the upcoming 2010 CMO Council CMO Summit on December 9 in San Jose, California, chief marketing officers from AIG, 24-Hour Fitness, and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) will share how they have rallied C-level executive support to act responsibly and effectively in times of crisis or compromise.

The session will feature a headline presentation from David Horlock, vice president of global inspections and audits at Intertek, a leader in product safety, component testing, ethical sourcing, and supply chain sustainability for some of the world's largest brands. Based in Hong Kong, Horlock has worked closely with leading companies to ensure the quality, integrity, sustainability, responsibility and compliance of operations, suppliers, products, labor conditions and work environments worldwide. 

The executive panel, entitled Corporate Incident Response: A New Measure of Business Performance, will look at the impact of corporate crises -- whether man-made, cyber-propagated or naturally inspired -- on a company's ability to protect brand reputation and shareholder value. Joining Horlock for this session will be Tony Wells, Chief Marketing Officer of 24-Hour Fitness, Rich Smith, Chief Marketing Officer of AIG, and Aaron Weinstein, Chief Marketing Officer of the San Francisco Bay Area mass transit system (BART).

The CMO Summit will gather keynote speakers and panelists from across the C-suite to share in their experiences, insights and best practices for optimizing three key areas of collaboration: Customer Experience, Marketing Effectiveness and Operational Efficiency.  The full-day event – themed around Synchronizing the C-Suite, will focus on ways chief marketers can more effectively enjoin and collaborate with CEOs and functional leaders in the finance, information technology, procurement, legal, operational and other customer-facing and back office environments.

Marketing and business leaders from Accenture, Chrysler, Prudential, Juniper Networks, Taleo, Denny's, Motorola, Lenovo, Wells Fargo, ADP, Papa Murphy’s, Nokia, FNC, Farmers Insurance, SAP, Orbitz, Egon Zehnder, SunPower, Merkle, Cisco, CA, AIG, Franke, and Wrigley’s will be among those attending the event.

The CMO Council’s CMO Summit (www.cmosummit.org) is the premier networking and thought leadership event in marketing and the official peer-to-peer networking event for the CMO Council (www.cmocouncil.org), an organization of more than 6,000 global marketers, controlling more than $200 billion in combined annual marketing spend. Invitees across both the B-to-B and B-to-C market sectors will be invited to attend this exclusive retreat to network with peers and tap into this global network of insight, access and influence.

For more information about the CMO Council's CMO Summit, please visit www.cmosummit.org.  Attendance to the North America Summit is by invitation-only, and while membership in the CMO Council is not required for attendance, member requests will have priority handling for this limited attendance event. To request an invitation to the CMO Summit, visit http://www.cmosummit.org/2010/invitation_request.asp. Senior marketers can be nominated for membership by visiting www.cmocouncil.org/members/nomination.asp