You feel you're part of a marketing business?

When you're dealing with the entertainment business, a business that deals with marketing and ratings and profit, you have to be suspicious. You get ratings by touching on stereotypes, the titillating subjects people talk about — their anxieties, fears, longings and desires. That's why hip-hop sells. But at the same time, I don't believe in censorship.

Everybody in the lodging business is going to benefit from the additional marketing. It should be equitable across the board.

Marketing costs are just skyrocketing, and if we don't address this we are going to put ourselves out of business.

You're typically going to have an IT person, a Web marketing person, a copywriter, and a business owner. If you don't sit those people down together in a conference call or the same room, and have them hash out a solution together, then it's a bad way to do project management.

[Bell got his feet wet in online marketing as director of retail marketing and e-business at Ford Motor Co.] My first job was to clean up the mess from the various Internet acquisitions made at Ford, ... The real gem was forddirect.com, which we were able to establish technically, and also gain the support of the dealer network via ownership and usage. In many ways, the things I learned at Ford about how they structured the Web influenced my later decisions at Daimler-Chrysler.