Interesting B2B Sessions at MPlanet

MPlanet, the American Marketing Association's annual boondoggle, is November 29 - December 1 at Disney World in Florida.

Looking at the schedule of events, here's the session dance card I'd recommend for a B2B person:

Day 1: 10:30-12:00; Driving B2B Marketing Success with Marketing ROI, David Lenskold. I know that Eric Kintz is in the middle of a marketing ROI program at HP so his talk could be fairly interesting. What I'm not sure of (as usual) is what marketing ROI means in this context. It's become the most over-used term in marketing these days and can mean literally anything. Based on Lenskold's book, it seems like this session could be fairly focused, though.

1:30-3:00; Value Partners and the Future of American Business Growth, Bill Glenn, Amex. I have no idea what this means, but if I had to guess, I'd think this was about partner marketing. It'll probably be a case study that goes over Amex's attempts at vertical integration of data and marcomm through the BP channel. Only thing that worries me is the lack of panelists.

3:30-5:00; Applying Traditional Metrics to Innovative Marketing Approaches, Erin Hunter, ComScore. From a crowded list, this session could be great / could be just a transparent pitch for ComScore. What I'd really like to see here would be a roadmap for apples to apples response measurement across online and offline channels, but we'll have to see.

Day 2, 8:45-10:15; Connecting Marketing Metrics to Financial Consequences, David Reibstein, Wharton could be interesting but also is largely redundant with the ROI discussion on day one--so I'd choose How World Class Organizations Innovate in B2B Market, Dale Henson, CMO GE. I'm most interested to hear Anil Menon speak from IBM.

10:45-12:15; How to Develop and Deploy a Marketing Dashboard, NPV and Citigroup. Boy, this is a crapshoot. On the one hand, good dashboards are always interesting, but on the other--what a tired subject. Dashboards have been overpromised, overengineered, underdelivered now for so many years I've personally lost my patience. If you're skeptical go to the McKinsey one, but that's could be vapor too with a title like "Monetizing the Media."

If you have a flight in the early afternoon, it doesn't look like you'll be missing much with the two closing perspective sessions.

Hey, who's missing from the agenda? G....g...g...google anyone? I see Yahoo! up there but it'd be interesting to hear Google talk about new media channels or ROI measurement.