I spent last Tuesday at BMO’s Marketing and Advertising Thought Leaders conference. Thanks to Pete Stack and Jeff Silber from BMO Capital Markets for the invitation to attend and sit on the EDU panel. Anna Maria Virzi from ClickZ covered the day here.

I shared the stage on the EDU marketing panel with some of the smartest folks in EDU lead gen. The panel was moderated by Jeff Silber and included Michael Platt from Plattform, Doug Brown from All-Star, Greg O’Brien from CollegeBound, and Steve Isaac from Education Dynamics. My notes from the panel:

* for-profit education is counter-cyclical as all of the companies on the panel talked about growing budgets

* there will be a flight to quality as schools increasingly choose the larger, better converting lead providers. Sparkroom tends to agree with this conclusion and hopes that Lead IQ is part of every school’s plan to get smarter about marketing and enrollment

* the not-for-profit universities are going to start marketing more like the career colleges over the next decade; I am not sure about this one — someone on the panel mentioned that Penn State, UMass and University of Maryland have all built large and successful online education divisions — I think it is going to take more than 10 years for a marketing and customer acquisition ethos to permeate the culture of the not-for-profit university

* all the panelists talked about regulation risk — particularly as it relates to the Department of Education regulating marketing education to potential students. One of the panelists did the quick math – $40B in for-profit EDU revenue, 25% of revenue spend on sales & marketing and 80% of the revenue comes from Title IV funding. Ergo, the Department of Education is spending $8B every year (through career colleges) marketing education.

I learned a ton over the course of the day and met some great digital marketing companies. Thanks again BMO for the invite.

We will be demoing some new product at LeadsCon (www.leadscon.com) next week in Las Vegas. The show begins Wednesday, March 4th and ends Thursday, March 5th. We are being featured in the Private Company Spotlight on Wednesday, March 4th at 11:45 AM. Looking forward to catching up with the industry next week.

Our first webinar happened yesterday, Monday, February 2nd. Thanks to all those who participated. If anyone would like to listen to a recording of the webinar, simply email us at events@sparkroom.com and we will reply with a link.Thanks.

Sparkroom is doing our first webinar in the higher education space. Get details and register here. The date is Groundhog Day – February 2, 2009 at 2 PM EST. Looking forward to sharing our EDU platform with you then.

UPDATE: Thank you to those who attended the webinar. For those who missed the live event, simply email events@sparkroom.com for a link to a recording of the webinar.

Last week, we were invited to present at the inaugural LenderPalooza in Houston by Owen Raun from RMC Vanguard. See the press release here. In addition to running one of the best lenders focused on online mortgage origination (see the shelf in his office with award after award), Owen blogs intelligently at www.mortgageonlineblog.com and he hosts industry luminaries on his podcast. Last week, he had the foresight to put together a group of the smartest folks in the industry to talk about ways to get better. At Sparkroom, we are all about transparency, and data, and sharing; anyway, we love other people and companies who share our vision and values. All in all, it was a great day and we will be blogging more about what we learned in the coming weeks. Owen – thanks for the invite and we tip our hat to you for putting this event together. And another hat tip to the all of the lenders in attendance who had the courage to share best practices with each other. Business is way more fun when you work with smart, trustworthy people.

Just a heads up that we are going to be presenting at Finovate Startup in San Francisco on Tuesday, April 30th. You won’t see our logo or data on the website as of today but that is only because we were just invited on Friday. Thanks to Ken Lin at CreditKarma for pointing us to Eric and the gang organizing the show. We will be presenting in the afternoon. Come watch our demo and swing by our table after the demo.

If you are looking to connect at Finovate, email me at jmcdonald at sparkroom dot com and/or Jamie Shulman at jshulman at sparkroom dot com.

Ed Powell, Sparkroom’s VP Sales, and I spoke with Owen Raun from RMC Vanguard last week about Sparkroom. Owen is not only one of the most progressive and innovative buyers in the mortgage lead generation space but he also hosts the industry’s leading podcast and writes a great blog (http://www.mortgageonlineblog.com). Read the post or click here to listen.

Sorry our posts have been light since LeadsCon but we have been swamped. Lots to talk about coming out of the conference. Huge thanks to Jay Weintraub for putting the show together.

We are going to be in Las Vegas at LeadsCon from April 2 to April 4.If you want to meet up in person, send mail to jamie at sparkroom dot com.