Palo Alto, CA (October 4, 2007)  — The CMO Council will host an elite group of senior marketers at the 2007 CMO Council Summit on December 12 – 13, 2007 in Sonoma, CA. In a day and age when marketers must blend and balance predictive allocation with adaptive allocation, this "Elite Retreat" will give decision makers the opportunity to contemplate, formulate and advocate best practices to demystify the “art” of effective budget allocation. Invited guests will gather to network with peers and take a hard look at how others formulate, justify and account for a growing part of overall business operating budgets.

“Marketers must all face their own set of unique challenges and requirements that can be exacerbated by industry, company size, region and even corporate culture. However, there is one key component of the role of the CMO that all senior marketers must face: budget allocation,” said Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “Marketers are often slave to three-Bs: the boss, the bottom line and the brand. This trifecta can necessitate a face-off between traditional areas of spend like branding and communications and those areas that bring true value, accountability and measurability to the marketing operation. The Elite Retreat will lay out those areas of allocation across the optimized marketing operational model to give marketers guideposts they can utilize to best adapt and adjust their spend in order to maximize their business impact.”

The CMO Council 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, an organization of more than 3,000 global marketers. Members across both the BtoB and BtoC market sectors who control more than $70 billion in combined annual marketing expenditures will be invited to attend this exclusive retreat to network with peers and tap into this global network of insight, access and influence.

Day One: Mapping New Marketing Operational Models

50 percent of new CMOs are recruited to fix broken marketing organizations, turning on the pressure to review, rethink and revamp global structures, resources and marketing operational models. The first day’s session will aim to reach a consensus on the optimal Operational Marketing Model for companies in different stages of growth and across diverse business sectors. The visual think session will outline new approaches and solutions that are being embraced to make marketing more nimble, productive and in-sync with corporate, line of business (LOB), regional, field, channel and demand/supply chain dynamics.

Day Two: Allocating, Adapting & Advocating Marketing Spend

Day Two will focus on how to best advocate, allocate, regulate and account for marketing spend as companies expand globally and face more choices and challenges in where and how they invest in demand generation, customer experience, retention and brand building.

With a major shift to “Adaptive Spend Strategies and Practices,” the annual budgeting exercise is being transformed into a continuous, year long process of spend calibration and flexibility. Global sales pipeline requirements, evolving competitive challenges, pricing and promotional developments, business issues and incidents, channel sell-through priorities, as well as opportunistic revenue-generating situations or partnerships are all driving and disruptive forces that might derail a marketing budget.

Attendees will break into dynamic discussion groups to champion a specific topic within the over-arching allocation debate. Marketers will be challenged to identify the key forces and factors that influence and shape the size and distribution of marketing budgets, including cultural, political, historical, and organizational.

For more information about the CMO Council 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 nominate a senior marketer for membership, please visit www.cmocouncil.org/members/nomination.asp. To request an invitation to the CMO Summit, visit www.cmosummit.org/2007/north_america/request_invitation.html.

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior marketing and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council's 3,000 members control more than $70 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures. Companies represented on the CMO Council have combined annual revenue of over $600 billion. Visit the CMO Council web site to find out about the initiatives geared to address executive marketers' challenges at www.cmocouncil.org.