Guy Kawasaki must be a skier. Because not long after leaving Las Vegas (from Pubcon) in December, he will be coming to Calgary to open the first every Bar Camp Calgary on December 15. Nobody comes from L.V. or Silicon Valley to Calgary in mid December unless they are crazy, in an Amazing Race episode or a skier.

Thanks to the efforts of Patrick Lor, Kempton Lam, Sarah Blue, David Gluzman and John Bristowe, the marketing and startup legend is coming to Calgary to give his ‘no-bozo’ advice and experience to the many tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Rockies.

This is going to be a great event. Besides hearing from the foremost expert on tech startups from his Art of the Start, and the Managing Director of Garage.com, the purpose of BarCamps is to have open and high participation among its attendees. What This means is participants will be able to tap the brightest minds in Calgary on all the various facets of web technology and marketing and cooperate in real time to help each other.

I’ve seen Guy present a few times, going back 8 years. He’s often asked to keynote events so he’s in circulation at many web and software conferences and so I’ve had the opportunity to see him speak. And of course, he’s written some great books, besides Art of the Start, such as ‘Rules for Revolutionaries’. As far as I know though, he’s never spoken publicly in Calgary so this is a real treat. This will be in front of a much smaller crowd, so he will be interesting to see him in this type of venue. He puts on a great talk every time, so I’m looking forward to it in addition to the Camping afterwards.

Bar Camps are user generated conferences, and as such, are not announced really. You will not have seen advertising on it, and attendees find out about it via blogging, RSS feeds, Facebook and from attendance at Demo Camps. These happen all over the world, wherever there is a large enough mass of techs and entrepreneurs to make it happen. To have one the first one in Calgary, and with Guy Kawasaki opening is a historic moment for the Calgary tech community and puts us in a different category. Thanks again to Patrick and the gang for this.

As of this writing, it is full, with a waiting list but there should be video and a wiki afterwards with the proceedings. Check Kempton’s blog for the latest on that later.

I got a copy of a 30 page report from IBM Global Business Services yesterday that predicts that there will more changes in the advertising industry in the next 5 years, than there has been in the last 50 years.

That’s a pretty bold statement from IBM’s professional services unit (which as far as I know, don’t have significant stake in online ads or even online marketing services). It goes on to state that there is a massive move to online advertising and warns ad agencies and media publishers that they’d better plan for new capabilities before advertising as we know it disappears.

The summary also states, ‘“There is no question that the future of advertising will look radically different from the past. The push for control of attention, creativity, measurements and inventory will reshape the advertising value chain and shift the balance of power.”

As I’ve referenced in my online marketing blog, companies like Microsoft (which does have a big stake) see a sea-change to online and digital advertising, led by Google of course, but now permeating everywhere and producing billions in valuation for Facebook, Myspace and other online destinations. And there’s the promise of personalized, online ads in mobile that still has to be realized. This is just a start of the cycle that fulfills IBM’s prediction.

Although there are no shortage of technology startups in providing the tools to hasten this change, you can bet there will even more, as advertising and marketing is uprooted and replaced with technology-driven versions that will give companies control over attention, creativity, measurements and inventory (think Google). There will be an insatiable demand for this, because it works way better than ’spray and pray’ marketing.

Marketing and advertising agencies beware. You’ve been forewarned…

Just got back from SF and the MarketingSherpa 2007 Demand Generation Summit and a series of meetings (and golf!). This is a very targeted conference, with the major B2B marketers from North America attending. Some of the revelations are:

- There is a LOT of online marketing going on in this segment
- Eloqua is well known and used by large companies in this segment
- Most of the attendees are very successful at marketing B2B products online
- The benefits of ‘eloqua’ type marketing tools are clear to them.

I’m very happy to hear this as we have been banging the drum on this for awhile, and it’s great to see how this market will start to graduate from email marketing to products like ActiveConversion and Eloqua. We even see companies jumping right over email, directly to ActiveConversion now, because they understand that they have to have an entire view of the marketing that drives traffic to their website, not just that from email. They want a single product, with integration to traditional marketing, as well as very popular marketing products such as Google, Jigsaw and Salesforce, rather than have a series of point products that they have to string together.

We’re happy to see Eloqua and their customers successful, because it proves that this all works well. Besides, they go after large companies with their pricing, while we have been successful at the SME side. They have more sophistication, while we have more simplicity and a much lower priced offering. They should have an interest in having us succeed, as some of our customers may graduate to their product in the future.

Eloqua has another similarity to us. We’re both Canadian companies, although totally unrelated otherwise, with no crossover of people, technology, etc. I think we have a common vision to make B2B marketing more effective and moving it into the 21st century. Cold calling, endless seminars, forgettable direct mail, and un-intelligent email is so archaic for demand generation today.