Recently, I attended the TPMA annual conference. For the uninitiated, TPMA is an acronym for Trade Promotion Marketing Association-a consortium of trade/channel marketers in the Consumer Products industry. There were some interesting observations about the conference which proves again that "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Below is a listing of some of the insights disseminated throughout the conference, my apologies for not referencing specific speakers as these insights are sampled across many.

1. For consumer marketers, the trade promotion budget typically represent 50% of the over all marketing budget-or more (a high of 60% and a low of 35% as polled). Despite most packaged goods marketer LOSE as much as 20% on trade programs when comparing overall costs to any lift in volume. I can say that this was reported via a prominent Packaged Goods marketer headquartered in Cincinnati (you connect the dots)

2. It's no doubt that trade promotion effectiveness can still be a strong differentiator. Those manufacturers who have established best practices and insightful analytics have the edge-and are setting the benchmarks for the rest of the industry.

3. People really make the difference, not the software or system. Manufacturers should focus in strategy, and insights to build a library of best practices-and out source back office administration.

4. Less that 1% of trade promotion is spent online-this is interesting as many B2B marketers may not agree with that, but again this is a consumer products group. The challenge here is the lack of insight as to how to effectively measure the impact of online success. This is largely an issue with packaged goods marketers.

5. Trade promotion is a global phenomena, with more than 60% of the programs/spend happening outside the US. Overall, the challenge is developing the infrastructure, program guidelines, and best practices to conform to a global standard.

6. Trade Promotion program design is an art as much as a science. 2 B2B speakers (?!) presented their programs which had similar objectives, similar channels, and yet very different structure.

7. However basic, the key metrics common to most Trade Promotion programs are:

• Budget to spend
• Net incremental sales
• ROI - consumption or shipment based
• ROI - variable and fixed margin
• Incremental spend

8. As with other product/channel types, social media is all the buzz. But like sex as a teen-ager, more people are talking about it than doing it. Retails however, see the value in social media as a relatively low cost means of capturing consumer insight and feedback. No true leaders are emerging from a TPM perspective-yet.

Interestingly, if you remove the point about social media, all the "Hot topics" from this years conference were similar to the topics held by this very organization 20-years ago. Yet despite all the advancements in go-to-market strategies and technologies very little has changed. In fact, the theme of the conference was "Collaboration in a digital age". Perhaps the power of technology has its limits?