Digital Media Trends and Future M with Debi Kleiman, President, MITX

Tuesday Apr 19, 2011 by Nancy Liberman - VP of Marketing, Searchandise Commerce

We interviewed Debi Kleiman, President, MITX (Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange) to get her thoughts on digital media, MITX and Future M and to hear what she thinks are some of the most innovative start-ups in Boston. 

What are some of the most interesting trends you're seeing in the digital media space?

We’ve been saying for so long that this year is going to be the year for mobile to really take off and change the game. I think now it’s finally true. You’ve got millions of people walking around with a supercomputer, location aware, social connector in their pocket – there seems to be an endless amount of ideas and opportunities about how to use it to make our lives simpler and more fun. For digital media, it’s an opportunity to drive better engagement delivering relevant content in context. I think we’re going to see a lot more technologies that allow this relevance to happen. And we’re going to see more business model innovation – so less about the technology per se, and more about how you combine already existing technologies in new and novel ways.

Can you tell us a little about Future M and MITX's role in the event?

MITX and a group of leading thinkers from the Boston area created FutureM last year as a unique way to showcase the talent, ideas and innovation here in Boston. It’s a multi-location event experience with over 50 events covering every angle on the future of Marketing. Taking place during the week of September 12^th-16^th, we’re expecting FutureM to be bigger, badder and better than last year.

The greatest part about FutureM is that it’s community-driven. Meaning that, for the most part, what happens during that week is a function of what people are excited about right now. We invite any organization, company, group, team, whatever, who wants to join in the spirit of FutureM to jump in with us, it’s a big tent. MITX is known for creating FutureM, but we’re also the engine behind how it all gets done, so we do a lot of the organizing of events, arrangements and planning. We have a great team of people who are members of MITX including many, many people who volunteer their time alongside their (very big) day jobs to make it an awesome week.

What are some of the most fascinating innovations you're seeing coming out of New England companies?

New England companies are doing amazing things! I think we’ve become a real hotbed for marketing analytics and mobile innovations that are very exciting. We’re lucky to have so much great talent here plus a culture of experimentation and development that comes from being in close proximity to such great schools and universities like MIT. Companies like DataXu who have developed technology to create a model that’s totally disruptive to the online advertising business. Or Innerscope Research, who has taken their MIT Lab experiment to measure physical consumer response to advertising and marketing and commercialized it so that any company can get data on consumers’ subconscious responses through a process that so much simpler than ever before.

As I mentioned before though, it’s not just about technological innovation but it’s also the new business model innovation that’s remarkable. We have a lot of great companies here that are taking technology and ideas and mashing them together to create something really interesting – like Modiv Media for example, they use mobile UPC scanning to help shoppers get offers and deals in context and also to check out of the store more quickly. Of course I can’t forget Communispace, while they didn’t create the idea of online communities, they were able to develop an extremely innovative way to use them and deliver a set of services around it that no one is able to duplicate at this point.

I also think many of our Boston-based Ad Agencies are doing incredible, creative work to help their clients activate their brands in digital and mobile mediums in ways that are relevant and meaningful to today’s consumers. That kind of work is really difficult and they make it look easy.

What do you read to keep up on the market?

I read a lot of blogs and get a lot of daily email digests in order to keep up with the digital marketing scene. I think Mediapost does a terrific job of culling all the relevant content and stories from online marketing and media to brand, mobile and social. I check out twitter throughout the day to see what’s breaking news or hot topics in our space, I follow some really plugged in thought leaders and writers – that definitely helps keep me informed. I’m also really passionate about what’s happening with the start-up scene in the Boston area. The stories behind these young companies and the new thinking and innovation that’s driving all this action in our space is so interesting to me. I read a variety of things including Xconomy, Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog, BostInnovation and VentureFizz to stay on top of who is doing what. It’s hard to keep up with it all, miss a day and you’re behind!

Nancy Liberman is the VP of Marketing at Searchandise Commerce.  You can find this post, as well as additional content on their blog located here. 

< back to all blog entries