For those readers of Dave's blog post who are not from Cincinnati, I join Dave in attesting that, along with the special folks who live and work here, there is definitely a deeply-rooted spirit of creativity and innovation, as well as a sense of camaraderie among marketing-field-related professionals. And, to Dave's litany of assets above, you can add a beautiful landscape and a renaissance of our downtown, our riverfront and historic districts. The end result: 'one heck of a place' to become “the Silicon Valley of consumer marketing.”

My only regret is that I will graduate with my Masters in Comm from NKU before they open the new social informatics building. It's going to be state-of-the-art to be sure.

In addition to all this, you have the other resources mentioned by Dave above.

Net, I think MarkA is hanging around with the wrong people. Most of the people inventing the future are pretty excited about the opportunity and, in fact, are inventing right here in Cincinnati

Rich Kiley – initiative leader

Further, the acendent drivers of marketing in the 21st century are:
* Design – Cincinnati has the largest concentration of consumer design firms in the country with LPK, Landor, Interbrand, Deskey coupled with UC's Design program at DAAP
* Data – Cincinnati has the largest concentration of consumer data analysis talent with dunnhumby, Nielsen and this will soon be augmented by NKU's new informatics center which will have a focus on conumer marketing data analysis
* Digital – where P&G stepped out as a leader in 1999 with the first industry-wide meeting to address digital marketing and is still a leader. Nielsen is the acknowledged leader in digital interactive data. Bridge is an acknowledge leader in interactive marketing.