In today's New York Times, Louise Story writes in "The Crystal Ball" about the trends she predicts for advertising in the new year.  While the trends exhibit the usual bias towards B2C, they are equally relevant for B2B marketers.   Here's a list of the four trends, with some thoughts on how they apply to B2B and executive-level marketing in 2007.

• "Consumers with a Conscience" - "Consumers want to know where products come from, how they were made, and what companies and brands believe in."   In a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, reputation, ethics, and what might be described as "corporate character" matter more than ever before. 
  
• "User Generated Advertisements" - "A growing list of brands are asking consumers to design commercials for them."  Executives may not have time to sit around and come up with clever YouTube videos.  But they can be engaged to create marketing messages and thought leadership in their own language for the contexts in which they work. 
  
• "Life Online or Offline" - "The online terrain is blurring with the physical world."  For most executives, the digital medium of choice is their Blackberry, not their Second Life avatar.   This probably won't change for sometime.  We have always been surprised that there aren't more custom Blackberry applications.
  
• "Pushing the Off Button" - "workers will be quicker to separate their work lives from their personal space."  Executives don't have the luxury of separating their work lives from their personal space. The challenge for marketers is therefore how to bring their message into executives' personal space without feeling intrusive.  As we've written earlier, we believe education and professional development is the way to do this.