On July 30, Espresso US hosted its inaugural unfiltered event—an exclusive, invitation-only gathering of Boston’s best and brightest marketing execs and business leaders. The goal of the evening was simple: to dissect and discuss this thing we’ve come to call “marketing 2.0”. Indeed, we managed to do all that and more.

First, we heard from Paul Isakson, Head of Strategy for space150. (Paul is also the genius behind @don_draper, the dapper protagonist of AMC’s MadMen. In case you missed it, Paul’s idea to experiment with a TV character on Twitter sparked a virtual phenomenon, numerous legal threats, and hundreds of copycats—not to mention our undying admiration). Paul deftly pointed out that the future of marketing is not about doing and saying things to people—it’s about doing things with and for people. And unlike the “interrupt, annoy, and shout-at-you-loudly” approach we’ve grown used to (and weary of) over the past few decades, the future of marketing is collaborative, generous, experimental, helpful, playful, personal, honest, and most importantly, participatory.

You can view Paul’s entire presentation on The Future of Marketing here.

Next, Matt Cutler, Vice President of Marketing and Analytics at Visible Measures, shared some intriguing data on what makes a “viral” video. Check out this video to hear more on this topic from Matt.

After that (and an appetizer or two), we joined Tippingpoint Labs’ Chief Strategy Officer, Andrew Davis, on his online search for meatloaf—and proved that the future of search is not ten blue lines. See Drew’s intriguing presentation here.

The grand finale of the evening was our CEO Panel, where The Boston Globe‘s Scott Kirsner orchestrated an intriguing panel discussion on what CEO’s really think of “marketing 2.0″. Thanks to Communispace’s Diane Hessan, Gather’s Tom Gerace, BzzAgent’s Dave Balter, and Eons.com’s Jeff Taylor for providing their wisdom, humor, and invaluable insight—and helping us to sober up a bit.

Last but not least, we added our own two cents (three, actually) to the subject at hand:

1. Buying people’s attention is infinitely easier than earning it. And infinitely less effective.
To wit: the typical paid TV ad campaign costs $1M for the creative and $25M for the media buy. That’s $26M to reach roughly as many people for 30-60 seconds a few times over. A typical Brand Infiltration-style campaign costs $250k for the creative and $250k for the media buy—sometimes less. And that $500k investment gets 30 million people to actually interact with the application, product, or website, in question—to experience it, in other words—for upwards of eight minutes.

Go ahead, do the math yourself.

2. People don’t care about ads, they care about experiences.
People want to be entertained, informed, enlightened, enraptured and inspired. They want to feel stronger, happier, thinner, younger, healthier, sexier, funnier, wealthier, smarter, more popular, and more successful as a result of those experiences. Think about it… the motivation behind almost everything we do is either fear or desire. And ads cant truly elicit either. But experiences can.

3. If your product sucks, marketing won’t help.
In fact, really good marketing for a really crappy product is only going to irk people. Really bad marketing for a really amazing product is also the kiss of death.

Now, we’re not suggesting that you stop spending money on marketing—clearly—we’re merely suggesting that putting lipstick on a pig… well… you know.

Our task as smart marketers (and brand infiltrators) isn’t to sell more stuff to all people; it’s to sell good stuff to the right people. It may not be the most altruistic of goals, admittedly, but it’s more honest and transparent than any marketing I’ve seen before.

Which brings us back to Paul’s idea that the future of marketing is collaborative, generous, experimental, helpful, playful, personal, honest, and most importantly, participatory.

We think the future is pretty bright and exciting (there’s our ‘glass is half full’ attitude again!).

What do you think?