From:Doug Bowman, 2007 ART Forum Chairperson

To:Pete Fader, AMA Market Research Council

From:Doug Bowman, 2007 ART Forum Chairperson

Nicole Morris, AMA

cc:ARTF Program Committee

RE:ART Forum Update

Date:December 13, 2006

[1] Program Committee

The committee was established in the weeks following the 2006 conference. It consists of the usual mix of 3 academics and 5 practitioners. Importantly, we have new blood; there are four who I believe are on the program committee for the first time (Bruce, Lee, Vicki, John).

Doug Bowman, EmoryUniversity

David Bakken, Harris Interactive
Tom Eagle, Eagle Analytics

Mark Garratt, In4mation Insights

Bruce Hardie, LondonBusinessSchool

Lee Markowitz, Ipsos

Vicki Morwitz, New YorkUniversity

John Wurst, SDR Consulting

Nicole Morris, American Marketing Association

As usual Nicole has been superb!

[2] Marketing the Call-for Papers

Using last year as a starting point, we sought to more aggressively market the CFP this year. This included:

• More mentions in AMA market research emails;
• Getting multiple placements in the lead position in AMA emails (Nicole worked hard to get this);
• Making 1-page hand-out available at the Summer Educator’s Conference (early Aug) and the Market Research Conference (Sept);
• Multiple full page ads in Marketing News (including some on the inside cover);
• Email blast to all INFORMS Society on Marketing Science members;
• Email blast to all past ARTF attendees;
• Full page ad in INFORMS Society on Marketing Science (hard copy) newsletter mailed to all its 1000 members;
• Link to the CFP on the home page of the MR Academic SIG;
• Email blast to all MR Practitioner SIG members (this was very effective).

Nicole was a big help in getting additional AMA resources behind marketing the CFP this year.

We also solicited Abstracts from a handful of potential presenters. In all but one case (Eric Bradlow), this resulted in a submission (most of which were accepted).

Compared to recent years, we got the CFP out earlier this year. We also set the deadline for submissions a couple of weeks earlier this year (Oct.20) to give more time to market the program.

[3] Scheduling Meeting (Nov.16)

We received 19 submissions from academics and 37 from practitioners. The collective opinion of committee members who had served in prior years was that the academic submissions were typical in their number and quality. However, the practitioner submissions were up in terms of quantity and substantially up in terms of quality.

We had a very hard time selecting practitioner papers. We turned away many that were clearly ARTF quality and would have made strong contributions to the program.

Because the practitioner papers were so strong this year, we ended up accepting one more practitioner paper that was typical in prior years. The program will have 11 practitioner papers, and 9 academic papers (including the Paul Green Award winner).

[4] Program

As in prior years, the program will consist of five 4-paper presentation sessions:

Session I: Market Segmentation

Session II: Choice Models / Consideration Sets

Session III: Behavioral Models

Session IV: New Methods and Practices / New Data Sources

Session V-A: Word-of-Mouth / Social Networks

Session V-B: 2006 Paul Green Award Winner

Last year, an award for best poster was initiated. Wecontinued that this year in the hope that it would help to attract more poster papers. Last year we had 7 posters at the conference (9 were accepted), this year we have 9 committed at this time. Some of the posters are papers that we deemed to be ARTF presentation-quality, but just did not make the presentation program.

[5] Tutorials

We have a full slate of 15 tutorials this year (last year we had 13). Three repeat and 9 offered one time. The tutorial and instructor(s) are:

Making the Most of Your Trip to the ARTF (Brazell, Ford):Sun AM

Latent Class Modeling(Kamakura):Sun AM,Sun PM

Applied ProbModels: Intro(Fader, Hardie):Sun AM

(NEW) Intro to Partial Least Squares (Chin):Sun AM,Sun PM

(NEW) Intro to Scaling (Ennis):Sun AM

Intro to Discrete Choice(Pinnell):Sun PM

An Intro to Bayesian Statistics and Marketing(Allenby):Sun PM

Agent-Based Modeling(Dean, Ragusa):Sun PM,Wed PM

Prob Models for Cust. Based Analysis(Fader, Hardie):Wed PM

Adv Topics in Discrete Choice(Pinnell):Wed PM

Advanced Bayesian Statistics and Marketing(Allenby):Wed PM

(NEW)Adv. Scaling / Dynamic Gaming(Ennis):Wed PM

We have 3 new tutorials this year. Also, we have some new instructors compared to last year. Greg Allenby and Wagner Kamakura are back. Damon Ragusa and Bill Dean take over the ABM tutorial and Pinnell is going solo this year (vs. tag-team with Orme) on the Discrete Choice tutorials.

[6] Marketing the Program; Santa Fe Location

We plan to aggressively market the program once the brochure is ready.

We have a hotel constraint this year that requires that we cap registration at 200. This exceeds last year’s attendance. The last time ARTF was in Santa Fe it sold out.

[7] Other Initiatives

Nicole and I talked about possible ways we could acknowledge loyal attendees. These include:

• Ribbons on nametag: “15+ ARTFs”, “10+ ARTFs”, “5+ARTFs”
• Poster titled “Celebrating ARTF” which would contain pics from past locations; list of attendees in the 15+ ARTFs club; list of past best presentations and posters; list of past Paul Green Award winners; info on the 2008 ARTF location.