LinkShare Symposium 2008 Event Wrap Up | JULY 2008

“The best Symposium ever!” That was the phrase often overheard at LinkShare Symposium 2008 which brought together over 650 managers and executives from the world’s leading and emerging e-commerce companies. A combination of networking and learning, LinkShare Symposium enables advertisers and publishers to strengthen relationships while obtaining key industry insights that can help drive results.

Tuesday morning’s events began with opening remarks from Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO and Founder of The Rakuten Group, who travelled from Tokyo, Japan to attend the event. Mikitani-san introduced LinkShare’s new Co-Presidents – Yaz Iida and Jonathan Levine – and shared with attendees how LinkShare is a critical part of its worldwide strategy for the future. Next Arun Bordoloi, Senior Vice President of Services at LinkShare, spoke about how LinkShare is improving the Advertiser and Publisher experiences with redesigned user interfaces, new services and new technologies that improve the customer shopping experience including LinkShare Flex Links and Easy Links.

Keynote speaker James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, roused the group’s enthusiasm with his remarks on the importance of collective intelligence explaining how diverse team of people will make better decisions than individuals or more homogenous teams . Then came the TrendWatch session, led by Patti Freeman Evans of Jupiter Research, which focused on the findings of a new study on shopping trends in the current tough economic environment. Later in the afternoon E. Kinney Zalesne, co-author of the bestselling Microtrends, illustrated the value of identifying and marketing to smaller groups of consumers with unique interests.

One of the highlights of the LinkShare Symposium is always the DealMarker session. DealMaker offers a rare opportunity for publishers and advertisers to meet face-to-face, helping to build better business relationships and discover new ways to drive revenue. At the end of DealMaker we announced the winner of the first ever LinkShare “Smart My Ride” sweepstakes! The lucky winner was Susan McNelis from DBG Loyalty. Congratulations Susan!

LinkShare Symposium 2008 ended with a night of drinks and dancing at the chic Hiro Ballroom in the Maritime Hotel.

2008 Award Winners
Congratulations to the following companies and individuals as this year’s award finalists and winners!

Special thanks to our sponsors