You may have already noticed a new theme on the lips of Forrester's Interactive Marketing role analysts. Tomorrow morning, I will be inviting the Forrester Marketing Forum audience to accept a new mission called CORE. CORE is a four part mission that challenges marketers to embrace interactivity. To compete in the next digital decade, the CORE mission states that you must customize, optimize, respond, and empower. CORE is also the theme of the Interactive Marketing track session at the forum, as Joanna O'Connell mentioned in her blog. Not only that, we recently published The Future Of Interactive Marketing, which lays out the CORE mission in detail.  In it, we offer a survey for you to take that will show you how far along you and your organization are at accomplishing the CORE mission. I also encourage you to check out Ad Age's CMO Strategy Profile for a glimpse of how CMOs are affected by interactivity and how the CORE mission is relevant for their future success.

What does all of this mean for interactive marketers? It means that today we are at a pivotal moment, one where the customer has gained enormous power and where technology advances have surged out of our control. Interactive marketers can either be courageous and lead their organizations into the future of interactivity or remain in a digital ghetto and quickly become irrelevant. I encourage you to reach out to IM analysts to talk about how the CORE mission applies to your business. It's a long road ahead and there is a lot of work to be done.