On June 10th and 11^th, The ARF will hold its Audience Measurement conference in NYC. It is a “don’t miss” event. New media behaviors, such as the degree to which people can pull information at point of purchase from their smart phones, are irreversible but they are just the first wave of sea changes that marketers and media companies will face.

I have arranged with my former ARF colleagues to offer a discount for this event to my readers.  Go to http://www.thearf.org/am-8.php and use the promo code JOEL.

To fully grasp the Sea Change that we are facing and why this event is so critical, I interviewed Gayle Fuguitt, new President of the ARF.

Joel: How do you hope this conference will change attendees’ thinking about media and about brand building?

Gayle:  We’ll address the biggest challenges facing our member companies today:   How to grow, How to allocate resources, How to course correct in real time, and how to get ahead of the curve…

Attendees will go home ready to be smarter, faster, and mobilize mobile, social, cross platform, big data and the researcher of the future

Joel:  What are the biggest gaps, the biggest unknowns about changing media behaviors that advertisers and media companies need to get a handle on?

Gayle: The biggest gaps we see are: enhancing marketing mix,   connecting disparate data  for quick insights to drive better decisions, new measurement solutions for new media,  cross platform learning.

The biggest gaps facing us today are:

1. the growth gap:   We need to face our CEO’s and deliver insights, drive growth experiment to learn  and then scale, vs. trying to create perfect measurement systems. The world is changing so quickly that our perfect systems will be obsolete by the time we finish them.

2. the simplicity gap:   we have a great opportunity to simplify as insight leaders and to synthesize data into keen insights for decision timed impact

3. the leadership gap:  this conference will provide experiential learning, peer networking, access to mentors and thought leaders, and plenty of interactive opportunity

Joel: How would you advise marketers to go about creating a plan for how fast they should move into digital and how they should do it…paid digital, social, mobile, etc.

Gayle: Marketer and insight-ers should just get out there and try things in an experimental mode, that’s what we’re doing at the conference…we’re having a mobile meet-up for the first time with our Young Pros, we’re having table top interactives on Day 1 about pressing topics of today:  including mobile , social, and  big data. We’re closing with “research unplugged” and offering a “concierge service” to customize conference tracks to attendee business questions.