We enabled the system to identify web pages referencing each of the teams specifically in the context of basketball. These pages were automatically analyzed  on a deep semantic level across three dimensions: safety, quality and topic. These massive amounts of analyzed traffic also provide us with a unique opportunity to glean insights and intelligence on current internet trends at large.

The graph below shows the request volume we received for each of the teams, as a fraction of the total number of March-Madness requests. The percentages are the relative share of each team in the total requests.

To further analyze this data, we sampled several tens of thousands of random webpages referencing Michigan and Louisville, the two teams of the original thirteen that actually made it to the Final Four. One point of interest was to see how geography differed for users interested in each of the teams. Generally, our analysis is on the page-level only, i.e. we have no data regarding specific users (cookies or other). However, to analyze geography, we looked up pages from domains which clearly indicated a specific geography (e.g. http://sanantonionews.com/) for local news and sports sites. Then, we tried pointing out areas in which one of the teams clearly had more page view volume than the other, which indicated significant inclination towards one of the teams, rather than the other.

The interesting results can be seen in the map below,  Louisville in red and Michigan in blue.

Louisville won the NCAA basketball tournament this year but based on request volume, Michigan was the big winner.  We’ll be following other big upcoming events, creating specific categories, which should yield some insights like we’ve seen in the past. For example, we created "Obama" and "Romney" categories before the elections and that resulted in some rather interesting findings.

But a browser company that owns 30 percent of the browser market has a greater responsibility to the industry they operate in than to just the user. Mozilla is ignoring a huge portion of these parties. I really believe that the company feels that they are working on behalf of their users, but I also don’t think Mozilla realizes all of the touch points that they are operating within. The user is the main party they interface with, but the Firefox browser interfaces with the web, and there are a number of parties involved beyond just the User. Let’s take a look at those parties.

Meet the surfer: The surfer, or “the user,” as many like to call this constituent, is the innocent person who traverses the web, day in and day out, reading this and purchasing that, watching that video and looking at this friend’s latest pictures or update. The surfer is the consumer of content and experiences offered by the internet, and the best part is that the majority of content online is free. Sure, there are some pieces so good that they’re worth paying for, but the majority of online content and activity is free of charge.

Meet the publisher: The publisher produces content and information for surfers and users to consume. In some cases they do this for free, or what would appear to be free, and in other cases there may be a payment collected in the form of a subscription. In all cases, there is value created by those who publish, produce, and distribute content online.

Meet the advertiser: Thank goodness for the advertisers, for without them, there would be no one to pay for all this great stuff online. Advertisers are typically companies that are looking to connect surfers with their brands, inspire them to buy their products or services, or consume their information.  Many advertisers also produce sites or catalogs of all sorts of things that surfers want. Think of Amazon or J. Crew, where a surfer can browse thousands of items and see what others have bought or looked at.

All three of these parties enable the online experience to develop, mature, grow, and produce wonderful experiences.  You cannot remove one of them and continue to grow and evolve in the same way. It’s just not possible.

Hurting Multiple Parties to “Protect” One
Unfortunately, that’s what Mozilla is attempting. By blocking third party cookies in the Firefox browser, the company is essentially eliminating the appeal of online advertising. Without cookies, it’s impossible to track ad placements and measure the reach of ads to a relevant audience – advertisers would be better off investing in print or direct mail, as those channels would offer better audience control. If the advertiser goes away, this strips a publisher of the ability to make money and recover costs of maintaining its site, thereby affecting the publisher’s ability to deliver free content.
The damage to two parties is supposedly all in the name of protecting the surfer, but the situation is comparable to a three-legged stool were two legs are being removed. In the larger context of how the internet operates, it just doesn’t make sense.

Mozilla recently published a post where an executive evaluated his daily ritual of surfing, both with the blocking and without. Of course, this demonstrated a drastic reduction in the number of cookies from third parties that were set on his computer. In the eyes of the surfer, this may seem preferable, as no company can track their movement online[A1] .

But this point is made without proper context, ignoring the fact that surfers rely on cookies to maintain their internet experience. A surfer visits his favorite publisher – maybe themorningnews.com -- to check out the day’s weather and what is happening locally. Without cookies, the surfer sees the same ad with every impression, on every page, in every size possible. Unfortunately for that surfer, it’s an annoying, irrelevant ad. And they see it over and over, all day, on their favorite site. Why? Because this publisher is not big enough to maintain an in-house sales force, and relies on third parties to generate ad revenue. Mozilla has removed this publisher’s ability to use these third parties to maximize revenue.

The Affects on advertising
Let’s turn back to the advertiser for a minute. Frequency capping is a mechanism that ensures users aren’t bombarded with the same ad on every page. High-frequency ads annoy users, and advertisers don’t like sending repeat ads either, as it’s a waste of impressions. Killing frequency capping makes an advertiser’s buys less effective (or, even more concerning, annoying to their customers), which makes them angry, and that ineffectiveness (and anger) eliminates the publisher’s means of monetizing content. Content which, keep in mind, is free to the surfer because advertisers pay for it.

Blocking third party cookies not only eliminates the ability to buy reach or frequency, but it kills attribution for conversions or sales as well, making it impossible for advertisers to measure whether or not ads are effective and how much they should pay the publishers and partners who drove the sales.

Advertisers have invested in services and technology to buy measurable, efficient and effective advertising. These strategies are not limited to targeting users based on behaviors or preferences, but also include the simple act of putting an ad in front of a user at the right time, or in the right context. If publishers can’t help, and technology has no real use, then advertisers have no incentive to buy online media.

This change will effect large publishers very little, as they will maintain their understanding of their visitors and remain in a good position to target that base. Small and medium sized publishers that rely heavily on third parties will not fare so well, and neither will their partners. Networks, exchanges, and other technology companies that provide value to the publisher will be most affected at first, but the effects will ripple throughout the internet economy. Advertisers will soon lose efficiency with their advertising, publishers will lose significant revenue, and surfers will be left with the bill at the end of the evening.

Considering that chain of events, it’s difficult to understand how Mozilla feels this decision even helps the user. Industry self-regulation efforts has made it easy for consumers to educate themselves on how their data is used and opt out of first- or third-party cookies. Mozilla was formerly in favor of this self-regulation effort, but now seems to have reversed its stance. Rather than empower users to make their own decisions around cookies, Mozilla is saying that browsers should dictate cookie policy on users’ behalf.

Cookies and third parties are not the enemy. They are not something to be scared of and block. Companies have made tremendous progress in using them more responsibly, and they are vital to the continued expansion and prosperity of the internet. Cookies are the current standard distinguishing one user from another, for everything from website personalization to making sure that advertising is more effective for all parties. Including the user. The user is important, and we should ensure they are educated and can easily make choices on this topic, but by no means are they the only player in this game. Without publishers and advertisers, there would be no online environment for the surfer to consume.

THE MYTH: Segmentation equals personalization.

Does everyone who falls into a certain behavioral profile have the same needs and wants at any given time? Most likely not.

Although the availability of dynamic customer data is helping mobile marketers shift their focus from demographical profiles to behavioral ones, there’s still an all too common practice that stands in the way of true personalization.

You probably know it well.  It’s segmentation.

You track and analyze how different customer behaviors impact desired actions. You define behavioral profiles, i.e. high spenders, moderate users, balance hoarders, etc.  You identify segments of customers based on these profiles.  You send offers to each segment.

That’s personalization, right?   Well, not exactly.

What about the behaviors that someone displays before they become a ‘moderate user’?  Or the predicted behaviors that may alter this classification? What about the customer’s current context?  Or their motivations for action after receiving an initial offer? What about the elasticity limits of the customer? Or their changing social graph?

In the world of dynamic mobile data, segmentation often falls short in delivering personalized offers.

THE REALITY: Personalization is only achievable at the individual level.

How often do you have the same needs in the same context as your neighbor down the street who is also classified as a ‘high spender’?  You work in the city; he’s retired. You spend based on need; he spends based on impulse. Your mobile device is for work and personal use; his mobile device is his sole connection to the Internet.

Personalization is about delivering the right offer in the right context to the right person. And although the stars may perfectly align for multiple people at the same time, it’s not likely.

It’s important for marketers to understand behaviors and needs as they change – for individual customers.  It’s also important to be able to act on that understanding with a communication or offer that’s both timely and relevant.

WHY IT MATTERS: Relevance builds trust and value.

How many pieces of mail do you throw into the recycling bin each week? What about the emails you mark as spam before you even open them?  What about the TV commercials that you mute?

Although the abundance of irrelevant offers delivered via traditional marketing channels may be annoying, we’ve come to accept the process of sifting through a slew to find the relevant few. And for email, we can pick the time when we’re up for the challenge.

Not the case with mobile. We’ve all seen the studies where people rank their mobile device as one of their ‘must haves’ – sometimes going to the extreme and ranking mobile device dependency above that of transportation, electricity or even running water. Consumers rely on anytime, anywhere communication, and with this dependency, comes high expectations – expectations for the carriers providing the service and for the brands that choose to engage with their customers via this highly personal channel.

Delivering SMS offers based on a group of ‘like’ behaviors or when it’s ‘most’ relevant for a segment of customers does not deliver on the promise of personalization via the mobile device. Nor does it deliver on your customers’ expectations of adding value to their mobile experience.

Yes, delivering offers based on understanding individual needs and behaviors at any given time does require more sophisticated analytics and advanced marketing technologies, but most marketers can’t afford to wait.

With new technologies that not only constantly track and monitor behaviors at an individual level but also leverage automated decisioning to enable action at the right time, marketers ensure optimal relevancy of each communication and offer.  And this means more value for everyone.

Next myth to debunk - “triggering an offer.”  Stay tuned!

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is in the air. And on the web. Online dating has replaced cruising the bar for other singles, especially during the website dating ‘high season’ between Christmas Day and Valentine’s Day. For those of us who’ve dabbled in Internet dating, the anxiety of choosing the right photos and words is an all too familiar feeling in the quest to attract “the one” (or just someone. Anyone.) But Amy Webb, CEO of WebbMedia Group, threw her human instincts by the wayside to master dating sites through a data-driven approach of mathematical equations, key words and an SEO-friendly profile. She logged her story in her new book, Data, A Love Story.

Webb joined JDate and was disappointed with her initial matches. On sites like JDate, the users themselves provide data. When ineffective data is entered into the site’s “matching” algorithm, ineffective matching is put out. Ergo – online dating is the pits, spitting back incompatible mates.Webb wasn’t satisfied with the system, and instead spent a month researching data points, crunching numbers and analyzing the competition, ultimately finding a formula for the most successfully matched user profiles on the web.

Here’s what she found:

The most successful women on the site had profile pictures that showed some skin, wrote short, positive bios and waited about a day to respond to messages from admirers.

"When you think about it, online dating is sort of the ultimate exercise in product marketing. Except that you are the product. So how can you leverage what you’ve got, how can you make sure you’re being seen by the most number of people?" Webb explains. "If you think of (it) as more of a catalog database ... as long as you know exactly what you’re looking for, it’s no different from doing a search in a library or doing a search for shoes on Zappos."

As a frustrated online dater I can’t help but be a bit exasperated with her findings. Weren’t we taught that the right person would like us for who we are? But as a brand strategist, I should have figured this out sooner. We are in an age that requires us to brand ourselves all the time, so why should it be any different in dating?

Before I landed a great job, I spent hours tweaking my resume. From format and font to titles and time frames, it never seemed quite right. But when I joined OKCupid, I only dedicated about 15 minutes to filling out my profile. In my (obviously) romanticized version of online dating, it would be easy to charm my potential suitors with my best photos and sparkling wit. But Webb’s story brings up a valid point – when positioning yourself for love, forget about branding for your own satisfaction. Like you would with any great product, use your data, strategize, and brand for the consumer.

Data is driving decision-making in more businesses and sectors, and in ways that would have been surprising just a couple of years ago.

As in: Oh my god, when you really get down and think about it (and read this article), Netflix’s development of the new buzzed-about show House of Cards was totally driven by data and insights they obtain from mining the habits of their subscribers. In fact, their entire business is only possible through the hyper-intelligent use of data.

And, that’s nothing, it’s just entertainment. Take a look at how that most basic of human drives — the desire to find a mate — is being shaped and recast, made efficient and effective through data wizardry. If, as the online dating companies claim, “20% of us meet our future spouse online,” then eHarmony, Match.com, et al are mining a lot of data with massive impact on the lives of many.

Data is critical to winning in the future of marketing.

As digital ad spending outstrips print and is poised to be the big dog in marketing, data grows right along with it. Down the road, nearly all forms of marketing will be digitized in some way— addressable and targetable. What this means is an even deeper trough of data for marketers, brands, agencies and media companies to mine for insights.

In short, all marketing relies on data but in the big game, the winners will be the ones who can sift through the biggest pile of sand and extract the gold nuggets. We’re seeing more marketers look for solutions to get a handle on the vast trove of data available to them and leverage it for smarter business decisions.

Facebook has a billion consumers on its platform, China has hundreds of millions of folks on mobile phones. All of these people, preferences and actions create data points that are of potential interest to marketers. How do we all benefit from our data being used? Why do we care? In the great value exchange, people will get better targeted messages from brands, some offers and savings, and maybe some interesting (ad-supported) content.

More facets of our lives are being impacted by data — mostly for good — and the onus is on each of us to understand what that really means.

Like the saying goes, “knowing is half the battle.” It’s an established fact that our data is being known, used and monetized by enterprises and entities far and wide. We all have a horse in this data-stakes, a few examples of which are:

• Politicians and government are using data in the democratic process, as in the data-driven Obama election victory in 2012.
• Insurance companies are using tons of data to model and predict who will get sick and cost them more money; or who should get lower car insurance rates.
• The growing use of wearable devices such as the Fitbit. They read our physical status and imagine what we (or others) will do with the data they throw off.

While there are many critical reasons to reform education and job training in this country, here’s one thing we definitely need to do: start preparing a generation of data scientists, analysts and engineers who know how to work with and leverage data to build our tomorrow. I know for sure that our future depends on it. We’re all data now.

• The inevitable continuation (and acceleration) of marketing data/analytics providers migrating from offline to online

• The inevitable continued migration of advertising budgets from search-to-display

• Increased demand for data (as we're still in the 2nd or 3rd inning of a long game)

• Consolidation taking place as highest-quality data providers rise to the top

Migration of budgets from offline to online is something that direct marketers have been experimenting with for some time, and this New Year is no different. Marketers, who have leveraged offline data to reach consumers through direct mail and other traditional offline channels, will continue to follow their target customers as they migrate online and onto mobile devices. Offline data companies that stand still will be left behind as marketers test, scale and leverage high-performing online data, sometimes on a stand-alone basis and sometimes integrated with offline data.

Along with this trend is the continued tendency for consumers to spend a significantly greater proportion of their time browsing rather than searching. To capture these audiences, sophisticated marketers will continue to migrate their budgets from search to display in order to mirror consumer media consumption patterns, reduce customer acquisition costs, and leverage scalable media sources as well as integrated and available third party data.

With consumers spending more time online and on mobile devices, demand for high quality, aggregated third party data will continue to increase as test budgets translate into permanent demand for high-performing data.

Finally, as the need for data grows, the Luma chart will become more consolidated as data-providing companies with high-performing, unique data sets rise to the top of the market.

Home Data Protection | Cloud Storage for Personal Data

Protect important personal and digital assets on an offsite public cloud such as Amazon Web Services and Google. Using various types of cloud storage platforms also keeps your information organized and easily accessible. Digital and technology blog Lifehacker.com recommends multiple free storage accounts for syncing files, storing music and backing up information.

For optimal online storage and security, Lifehacker suggests exploring the following cloud options:

• SugarSync: Utilize extensive features and 5GB of free storage for syncing media and hard drive files. SugarSync is also a robust digital location for photo storage as well as instant and automatic backup storage.
• Amazon CloudDrive: Access music from anywhere by storing files on Amazon Cloud Player. Amazon CloudDrive offers 5GB of secure and easily recoverable storage for free or a 20GB album for a low price.
• IDrive: Access files remotely with IDrive's smartphone app feature. You can also rely on secure Windows and Mac automatic backup, social media integration and cutting-edge visual sharing.
• Dropbox: Sync and access files stored on an array of computers and mobile devices through a Dropbox. Dropbox provides file accessibility with or without an Internet connection and sharable features for projects and documents.

Data Disaster Prevention

You may not be too concerned about data storage and protection until it's too late. It's easy to dismiss the idea of a stolen laptop or forgotten tablet until it's happened to you. Losing a notebook computer or tablet is devastating enough; but to lose personal data, such as invaluable documents and irreplaceable photos can be incomprehensible.

According to TheNextWeb.com, you can prevent a lost-data disaster by taking the following precautionary steps:

• Save Computer Details: Use an online storage program to protect your data by creating an emergency folder and generating a system report. Saving a system report to a cloud storage platform, such as Dropbox, provides details that will help your computer be identified if it goes missing.
• Make Hard Copies: Transfer information into a physical document and file docs in an organized system. File copies in a safe location besides your home.
• Install Prey or Undercover: Install the tracking software Prey or Undercover so that if your notebook or tablet ends up in the wrong hands, you can retrieve it. Each of these services provide state-of-the-art features such as webcam activation and police support.
• Back-Up Archives: Store your data, information and archives using a cloud computing solution or reliable backup tools. TechRepublic.com emphasizes that backing up "data to an external drive and to rotate that drive offsite" is critical. Keep your data safe with backup tools Acronis Backup and Restore (with Universal Restore) or Symantec Backup Exec.

Document Protection & Organization at Home

From insurance policies and loan papers to tax information and death certificates, a multitude of documents are most likely lying around your home in a folder someplace. Are your valuables and important documents disaster-proof? Are personal records and information protected from an unexpected fire or natural disaster? Imagine the devastation of losing irreplaceable mementos and essential documents, such as family social security cards, birth certificates and medical records. It's not good imagery.

Prevent catastrophic loss and protect your family assets with the following tips:

• Lock Valuables in a Safe: Protect valuables and private information with a fire and theft protection safe. Family heirlooms, expensive jewelry and invaluable possessions should also be safely stored in a safe with a lock.
• Duplicate Copies: Make copies of important documents. (e.g. social security cards, birth certificates, passports, insurance policies, medical records, wills, trust documents, birth/death certificates, titles/deeds, licenses, legal/financial papers, tax returns, and bonds/stock certificates)
• Organize Documents in a Filing System: Ensure that original documents are safely organized in a home filing system. A portable binder or filing storage are convenient devices for transporting important paperwork such as bank account information, property records and business documents.

Business Data Protection | Private, Public & Hybrid Cloud Storage

For enterprises and small businesses, the cloud has become an optimal solution for securely storing and accessing data. Private cloud computing are hosting services for a specific organization; the organization controls the infrastructure as well as the exchanged data and workloads. A public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services and Google, is governed by a third party that hosts IT resources for the public and other consumers. Hybrid clouds are hosting services that utilize both local and off-premise systems. Hybrid cloud computing combines the use of internal and external clouds for business resources, applications and operations. Resources in a cloud, such as applications, email, documents and networks, can be securely accessed from mobile devices anywhere, anytime.

Data Security

According to CloudTweaks.com, cloud storage platforms provide state-of-the-art solutions for encrypted logins, protection from unauthorized access and security control of stored information. EWeek.com reports that a comScore Microsoft study concluded: "35 percent of small and midsize businesses have experienced higher levels of security in cloud environments." Virtual clouds enhance data security, business continuity and disaster preparedness, which also ensures that an organization minimizes downtime and mitigates data disasters. Cloud platforms also run automatic software updates and security applications for maximum protection. Relying on a cloud reduces the amount of time reserved for in-house security management and execution.

Cloud Backup

The cloud is a premium and dependable digital space for backing data and confidential information. Online backup ensures that valuable business information is securely stored, easily accessible and retrievable. By storing information on a remote system, data is duplicated and files can be restored in the event of digital disaster. The NYTimes.com on Technology explains that backing up files isn't as tedious or difficult as backing up to an external hard drive, for example, "because the process has become entirely automated." The NYTimes.com suggests cloud-based companies, including Carbonite, Mozy, Backblaze and Crashplan, for a myriad of diverse backup features and industry-leading enterprise data security.

So many experts are predicting dramatic growth in rich media spending over the next several years.  Forrester, to name just one, predicts almost 150% growth over the next four years.

And for good reason. As branding dollars rapidly shift to online media, it’s critical that brands find creative tableau that can deliver powerful and memorable experiences.

But rich media needs to be about more than pretty. As marketers race to align their plans to data-driven strategies and tactics, we need to ensure that our rich media efforts are part of that future. I call data-centric rich media Smart Rich, as distinct from Dumb Rich, where creative technique must carry all of branding water in an execution.

Smart Rich is about using user data to deliver tailored experiences. About pushing the envelope of dynamic creative to encompass every aspect of what will be persuasive to a customer. And about using first- and where necessary third-party data to give greater purpose to the engagement made possible with rich media technology.

To do this right you need to combine, clean, and make available all of your cross channel data for user insights. Then to create integrated teams of analysts, creatives, media experts, and rich media providers to carefully craft executions that can leverage all aspects of a user profile. If ever there were a situation where cross functional collaboration was essential, rich media is it.

The flip side of Smart Rich is that technology makes it possible for rich media to collect as well as use data. Not just impressions, time spent and clicks. I’m talking about using rich media interactivity to elicit user information that would be difficult or impossible to gather in any other way.

As we explore opportunities for clients in 2013, we should take a long, hard look at both the data available to strengthen our rich media executions and the persistent information gaps that prevent brands from having a truly 360 view of a user.

I can foresee executions where we learn just how “in market” a customer really is. Or about someone’s personal style so that we can tailor future marketing efforts in that direction. Or about the genuine depth of personal relationships.

One of the biggest opportunities, in my view, will be for CPG. Packaged goods marketing lives sleeps eats and breathes psychographics and brand personality. Think about Axe, Dove, Herbal Essences, Oscar Mayer, and Campbell Soup. There’s a lot more to these brands than efficacy or a nutritional profile. They’re at least as much about how they make you feel as they are the functions they serve.

So CPG is emotion driven. Whereas so much digital marketing user data is straight up rational. With rich media we can ask people how they feel, or collect insights based upon opt-in rich media activities that reveal what people feel and like.

Digital media have got the science of the mind more or less nailed. Data-informed rich media – Smart Rich - is the key to putting digital in service of understanding our hearts. Beautiful execution makes that possible. But the rich media of the future needs to be about beautiful execution and a whole lot more.

-----

photo credit: garland cannon

Being a regular cinema goer I have an online account which I regularly use to book tickets. In this instance however after booking my tickets for the latest Bond film, Skyfall, I received a marketing message telling me that there were still tickets available at my local cinema. It led me to worry my order hadn’t been completed and with my professional hat on, clearly demonstrated poor integration between the ordering system and the marketing data.

Essentially the blog covers why it’s important for companies to use data correctly if they are going to collect it and highlights the confusion that can occur when different systems don’t speak to each other effectively.  I’ve also included some of the key tips on how companies can make the most of integrating their customer data and marketing campaigns to achieve positive customer experiences.

Originating with direct mail before being applied to online, A/B testing continues to be used as a means for determining what is more effective in driving response rates.  But when are marketers going to stop shooting for the average?

A typical A/B test would help you measure the impact of certain elements, such as:

• Does a percentage or dollar value discount drive customers to respond?
• Does a concise or extended amount of product information lead to online purchase?
• Does an immediate or extended call to action more likely to drive a purchase?
• Does a confident or humorous tone lead to a higher response rate?

The assumption is made that if group A’s treatment results in a higher response rate, than this is the ‘winner’.   A perfect fit for all?   Not likely.  What about the people that actually preferred offer B?   Force offer A on them?  And what about offers C, D and G relative to offers A and B?  What about messages F, J and M?  Content elements G, H, and L?  Plans E and H?

Now sure, a marketer could test each of these different combinations to determine the winners.  But how long would it take?  And chances are that the marketer would have no way to determine the efficacy of each message by customer in a given context.

But if you could target the best offer at the right time and place to each customer, would you shoot better than average?  In a word, yes.

Contextual marketing is relatively new and it’s not something that can be done easily given the vast amount of data that exists and the difficultly associated with harnessing that data.  There are, however, new technologies in this area.  They involve real time data capture and analysis and sophisticated machine learning to determine, for example, the best context for engaging each customer and the most relevant message – whether it be promotional, educational, informative, billing related, etc.

Let’s look back at the A/B test examples above.   Now let’s take them a step further to incorporate context:

• Does a percentage or dollar value discount drive a multi-purchase customer to respond when delivered 48 hours after a previous purchase?
• Does a concise message or one with more detailed product information lead to online purchase for a customer who engages with our app at least three times a week while at home?
• Is an immediate call to action more likely to result in a purchase for a recently-acquired customer who works within a five mile radius of your retail location?
• Does a confident or humorous tone lead to higher response rates for customers who have decreased usage by more than 25% over past month?

Questioning if this is possible?   Most marketers have the data – purchase history, location information, usage, tenure, loyalty scores, etc. – but do they have the tools to easily act on it?

Recently some mobile marketers have discovered new technologies that allow them to test hundreds of treatments simultaneously to determine the efficacy of messages and contexts, learn through automated analysis and model generation, and then seamlessly iterate and optimize campaigns to ensure delivery of the best treatment to each customer.

Essentially what makes this move from A/B to A/Z testing possible is machine learning.  With machine learning capabilities, you can rapidly – that is, automatically – determine what is the best offer for a given customer and context.  The technology does all of the complex analysis to sort out what works best for whom, when, where, etc. and automatically identifies which factors drive a certain behavior or outcome, thus eliminating the guesswork.  As a result, marketers gain the ability to test an infinite number of combinations of offers and contexts, get quick learnings, and then based on the insights continually iterate and optimize.

Part of the glory of this type of technology is that the drilling in to the details of campaign performance is no longer manual.  Machine learning automatically identifies which factors among hundreds of behavioral and demographic attributes drive a certain behavior or outcome for an individual customer. What this means is that it virtually eliminates the manual nature of analyzing campaign performance and trying to figure out which rule or condition, for example, led to a positive response.  The result is that by targeting the best offer in the right context to each customer you’re able to maximize returns in terms of increased lift for every one-to-one communication.

So for those marketers who are still shooting for the average – that is looking for the winner in either A or B and blasting the winner to the entire customer base, I say it’s time you look at what is going on in mobile.  Mobile has forced marketers to figure out how to act in context.  Mobile marketers are making great strides in harnessing the vast amount of data that they have to be smarter marketers.  They know that being relevant requires understanding your customers’ behaviors, and actually monitoring behavior in real time to then deliver the right message in the right context to the right customer.

They are realizing that determining the right context and the right offer means more testing.   But using machine learning means less guesswork in determining what is working and why.  It means shorter cycle times for campaigns.  And it means less dependency on internal and external groups to develop and deliver campaigns.

Finally marketers can spend more time thinking creatively about what delivers more value to their customers rather than how to deliver it.  As a fellow marketer I say…that’s a winner.

Being the “strategic partner” or the “strategy guru” setting direction and vision at 10,000 feet is what everyone seems to define as more important work, while the “in the weeds” business around tactics and execution seems to be considered far less sexy.

There are many things wrong with letting this veneration of “strategy” and false distancing of strategy from “tactics” take over your personal or organizational thinking.

The simple fact is that sound strategy depends on having good information, and information or data gathering is a tactical endeavor. Even more importantly, strategy that provides a unique competitive advantage only comes from having information that your competitors don’t have. Finally, even the best strategy means nothing without capabilities and effective execution. Thus strategy that doesn’t also consider tactics and logistics is useless in practical terms.

The Mythical “Strategy Guru”
What I typically see manifesting as the result of the common notion of “strategic work” is a diminishment of the value of unique data, and the enlargement of the individual interpretive capability. “Strategy” deliverables tend to be, at their best, a synthesis of ideas from commonly available sources; Forrester, eMarketer, the latest NYT best-seller on Mobile, Social, etc. What makes this synthesis “strategic” is the addition of an opinion or interpretation or “future-cast” by the compiler. For three strategies developed from the same data, this approach differentiates the quality of each “strategy” entirely on the intelligence of the author.

This can work if you have a really brilliant and predictive thinker working for you. The first problem with this approach is that in reality, these people are rare (though I do know some). The second problem with this approach for organizations is that even if you have them around, basing your organization’s strategic capability on the “special insights” of one or two brilliant thinkers means risking the loss of your strategic capabilities if they defect (or rather “when they defect” in the Marketing and Advertising field).

However, from its origins in military thinking, “strategy” is not about unique interpretations of common data points (that is more properly considered “insight”, “discovery” or “invention”, and again, it is rare, despite very persistent effort), but is rather a structured approach used to create advantage over adversaries. It is a method that should allow almost anyone to combine data and systematic thinking to create ideas for advantage. (Choosing the right strategy is another problem, best left to Generals with long experience in the field).

Coming Down from the Tower
In standard terms, the strategy development process is predicated on setting clear and achievable objectives. However, in my line of work, thinking in terms of “objectives” seems to be seen as “executional” and somehow beneath “strategy”, which is instead perceived (desired) as “blue sky” thinking without constraints. In standard terms however, strategy is understood as the art/science of achieving positive outcomes in consideration of or in spite of constraints.

From there, the strategy development process involves considering data in the context of those objectives. How are opponents moving? Where do we have the opportunity to move? When is the right time to move? Will we surprise our adversary? What resources should we move at that time? What can we give-up in exchange? Who should have final say about this move? Can this move be explained to everyone who needs to understand it to carry it out? Answering all of these questions requires having data. The more accurate, complete and unique your data, the more effective your answers, and resultantly your strategy.

Bridging the Divide
The idea of strategy as something distinct from tactics or execution must be corrected before truly effective strategy can be delivered. The true strategist will not recommend action based on opinion or subjective interpretation, but will only recommend what they have evidence to support. For that evidence, they will discount data available to all competitors, and will desire as much unique information as they can gather, understanding that the more context and situation specific the data, the better the strategy will be. They will understand objectives before they suggest action. And they will suggest action that realistically considers what is possible.

In summary, if you’re looking for effective strategy, look for a process that has diverse and unique data at its core, that understands resource capabilities and constraints, and that has a feedback loop with what’s happening in tactical execution which can be applied to continuously adjust and optimize further strategic recommendations.

This content was originally published on the author's personal blog.

What’s great about the Olympics is that it is the only sporting event that is made up of hundreds of amazing “moments”, each that become personal for viewers whether by country, event or athlete.

For some, it was…

• Gabby Douglas giving her coach a hug after becoming the first African American to win the all-around in gymnastics

Or, maybe it was…

• Michael Phelps biffing (taking 4^th ) in his first event but still walking away winning 4 gold and 2 silver medals to become the all-time Olympic record holder with 22 medals

Or, maybe it was when…

• Kirani James from Grenada exchanged his name tag with Oscar Pistorius of South Africa, the first Para-Olympian to ever compete in the Olympics, right after James won the gold medal in the 400 meters

Or finally for others (say the more cynical) it was…

• In badminton (love that as an Olympic event) where the #1 team in the world from China was disqualified for trying to throw their match so they could play a weaker team in the next round

All of those Olympic moments were amazing.   For me, however, being more a marketer than an Olympic caliber athlete (refer to my last post as reference), it was the Olympic advertising moments that were amazing!

The Super Bowl gets all the advertising hype but the Olympic Games are like the Super Bowl on steroids (okay, bad pun) with over 3,500 hours of streaming coverage generating nearly $1.2 B in advertising.

So what was the Olympic moment for advertising?

Was it the epic BBC 3D animated mini-movie commercial where animated athletes swim, dive, box, throw the javelin and of course run really fast, with the back drop of London buildings and landscapes of the English waterways and country side, all to an orchestral musical score that even composer John Williams would be proud of?

Or maybe it was the classic “shot (soccer) heard round the world” commercial for Samsung Galaxy where David Beckham drills a soccer ball into a ginormous gong being pulled by a truck from about 300 yards away that triggers people from around the world playing street sports while others video them on their, what else, Samsung phones.

Nope.  It wasn’t even the heartwarming Procter & Gamble ads with vignettes of little kids being woken up by mom early, early (did I say early?) in the morning to make their little darlings breakfast, then drive them to the pool, gym, track or court (badminton court for the cynical) where mom sits in attendance, then cuts away to a shot of a now grown up athlete competing at the Olympics with mom in the stands.  Tears flow.  For all the moms in the world, the tag read: “Thank you, mom.”

These are all great ads – ads that focus on the people that made the athletes great or on connecting people from around the world.  These ads take viewers away, suspending time and place.  The real Olympic advertising moment, however, didn’t take viewers away, it kept them right in the here and now.

The real advertising moment of the Olympics was the AT&T commercials.  These ads took actual footage and results from events as they JUST happened and seamlessly inserted them into pre-produced commercials.   The “shock and aw” part was that they aired these spots in the commercial pod shortly (within hours) after viewers saw the live event.  And in some cases, like in Seattle, the ads aired immediately after the actual event.

The commercials are called “real time” ads.  There were six AT&T ads produced in all.   From Ryan Lochte winning gold in the 400 IM to Sanya Richards-Ross winning the 400 meter dash, the ads celebrated events of the games just after the event happened.

This was my experience.  I am sitting at home watching the woman’s 200 meter breaststroke.  As expected, Rebecca Soni wins the race but in the process breaks the 2 minute 20 second barrier by 1 second.   NBC cuts to a commercial.  A teenage girl is walking into her house.  She drops off her bag.  She’s focused on her smartphone and you can tell she’s watching a video.   Camera pans down to her screen and you see’s watching a swim race.  You notice her hair is wet.  Camera zooms into the screen and both audio and video tell you it was the 200 meter breaststroke you just saw.  You hear the announcer say Soni breaks the world record.  Then the kid walks up to a whiteboard in her kitchen and writes “Goals: 2:19.59.”

I recall when I worked at Saatchi and Saatchi in NY, the process to create a 30 second television spot was akin to planning a wedding.  It took months to develop (and approve) the creative concept, months to map out the production schedule, and weeks to set up, shoot, edit the commercial and traffic it for airing.

Dubbed “Here’s the new possible” this marketing campaign showed the power of messaging in context, delivering 100% relevance and doing it in real time.

Much like Usain Bolt breaking the world record in the 100 meters, AT&T’s ads are a breakthrough for marketers.  The ability to offer real time broadcast advertising that is hyper-relevant is huge.   And it was based on leveraging data.

AT&T did a longitudinal analysis of both the athletes and historical performance in that event.

They knew an ad featuring one of the athletes competing in an event at a scheduled time was a critical longitudinal piece of behavioral data that they could use to then highlight that same athlete in their advertising at a later context – right after the scheduled event.    They then took other data points, like which athletes were most likely to make the finals, their historical performance times, and predicted the likelihood of who would win and if they could beat the world record.

In short, data on athletes’ prior behavior (personal bests) was used to predict future behavior (gold medal winner). They prepared for all the possibilities based on the most probable outcomes: 1) Male or female?  2) Potential winning athlete?  3) Likely times?   4) World or Olympic record?

They then developed templates to splice into the ads based on those probabilities.  And finally they purchased the commercial pod right after the event they created the commercial for so they could run the ad with that exact athlete and their performance.  (And depending on your time zone and tape delay you could see that ad as close to under a minute of when the event aired!)

The AT&T ads illustrate that the world of advertising (and marketing) is changing.  Data combined with prediction and capabilities that create multi-variant options to create 100% relevant communications that are delivered in context is happening.   And this is just the beginning.

Just as the Olympic flame has been passed from London to Rio, the marketing torch has been passed from the mass market campaigns based on gut and feel for “mom’s around the world” to ones based on contextually relevant targeting driven by big data, longitudinal analysis and expedited delivery.

It’s time for more Olympic marketing moments like the one brought to us by AT&T where marketing is hyper-relevant and personal.

To steal AT&T’s line, it’s time for “the new possible.”

Let the games begin.

This being said, producing consistently engaging content has its challenges. Every once in a while we hit a wall in our content marketing efforts. It's not necessarily that our tried and true methods aren't working, but sometimes our audiences are simply looking for a new way to consume the type of content we share. Take infographics for example.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last three years, you know that infographics are a popular way of providing and consuming content. Because they became popular so quickly, many are already lamenting the death of the infographic, but more than likely, infographics are going to transition from being a trendy content item to a consistent part of content strategies.

As with any new tactic or approach, make sure that the benefits directly align with your overall content strategy, and that you set clear metrics for success. Below are a few examples of tactics that may align with your overall marketing strategy to help energize your efforts.

1. Guest Blogging and More
This can be a powerful way to attract new visitors to your content, get visibility on new outlets, and save internal time and resources required to produce new content.

There are three potential ways to use this tactic. First, consider letting other people guest blog on your own company or organizational blog. This allows credible experts on topics related to your organization speak on the issues that you want to speak to your audience about. It lends third-party endorsements to both your company and your position in your industry. It also benefits you with additional audiences and exposure that you’ll get from having your guest blogger broadcast his or her post to their channels. In all, you’ll reach a new user base and the guest blogger serves as a great referral to your organization.

Second, take advantage of guest blogging opportunities on other sites that your audience is reading. Make it easy on yourself and go where your audience is! Make sure you’re targeting the right people when you do this though. Some industry blogs can be filled with an audience comprised more of your competition than your customers, and this can dilute the effectiveness of your efforts. When done correctly, this also has that element of lending the credibility of a referral from a trusted source to your blog and your organization as a whole.

Third and finally, it goes without saying that customer testimonials are a great tool for building confidence and talking about you in ways that only a trusted third party can credibly do. Why not take this a step beyond a quote on your site and work with your client to create a more in-depth testimonial for you. In addition to guest blogging opportunities, create presentations, webinars, videos and other types of content that allow your customers to reach an even larger audience. All the while, you are benefiting from their testimonial, and it serves as a win-win for both you and your customers.

2. Revisiting the Past
If your company has an interesting history, look for opportunities to create content centered around memorable events in your industry or the world at large.

Even if your company is younger, use this as an opportunity to point out how much you’ve grown in such a short period of time. For instance, was there an important employee hire, or a significant number (e.g. “3 years ago today, we hired our 20th employee, and now we are at 5,000 employees!”), or a significant revenue figure or customer/client that was awarded?

Find ways to make small holidays out of important milestones in your company’s history. It gives context to where you are today and illustrates the momentum you have moving forward. It draws attention to important leaders, to your customers, and to how your company fits into the historical fabric we all share.

3. Unique Lists and Weekly Digests
It’s your job to know what is happening in your industry, and what trends, products and news are relevant to you and your customers. You are already doing research, either personally or as an organization, on the latest best practices and happenings, so why not establish yourself as a reputable go-to source of the ‘”best of the best” each week, month or even quarter?

There are several reasons why this works:

• You are establishing yourself as the authority on the topic; able to distinguish what’s important and what’s not.
• You are providing a timesaving service by weeding through the noise and sharing what is truly valuable to know.
• You are able to establish a viewpoint on the important things happening in your industry, thus reinforcing your company’s philosophy and value proposition.
• From a time/cost perspective, you most likely are already following this information anyway. You are simply collecting what you already know and framing it from your organization’s perspective as a resource to your audiences.

Start off with a manageable frequency, so you don’t bite off more than you chew from a time and resource perspective. If a weekly list is too much, start off with a monthly list or even start with a single item once a week. Many companies do this on their Twitter accounts with a themed day such as Follow Friday (#FF). It allows a consistent content strategy without a commitment to producing a specific amount of items in a list.

4. Personalize Your Content
This one may not work on every platform you have or with every tactic you’re using in your digital marketing, but there are many ways to do it. The most typical way of personalizing content is to allow account creation so that when a user is logged in, they see “members only” content that is only accessible behind a login. Or on e-commerce sites, you can enhance the users’ experience by showing them things related to what they’ve already purchased.

On your website, use personalized content to show users who performed certain actions, are referred from certain sites, or located in certain geographic areas. For instance, if you visit a retail chain with a store locator, once someone (whether they are logged in or not) searches for a location, find ways to tailor the content you show him or her to that location. You can do this beyond your website as well. Perhaps there is a store special going on or an event coming up at that store. You can utilize email marketing, whether through marketing automation or a strategic program of list segmentation, to tailor information to individuals who fit certain criteria.

As always, make sure you are engaging in tactics that directly support your digital strategy and marketing goals, and make sure that you put some measurements in place to make sure that you can assess their effectiveness after a short while. For more advice on this, read my blog post “Don’t Get Lost in Tactics.”

Hopefully, these ideas have inspired you to add new energy to your content strategy. If you have other ideas or tactics that have worked well for you or your organization, please leave a comment below and share your ideas.

It’s about time that digital marketers learn how to be more real.  Well, more real-time. Just like Darwin said, it’s not about being the biggest, or the smartest, it’s about responding fast.

Digital marketers are clamoring to leverage social media data and real-time marketing technologies to understand consumer attitudes and interests, but listening and responding on a traditional media cycle is too slow. A four-week reaction time is too late to leverage anything that happens. Listening and media buying need to happen together, in real time.

How many times have you noticed the same exact video or funny picture (most likely of a cat or wedding proposal) being shared by a few of your friends on Facebook? Then at dinner when you wanted to share this funny piece of content, alas, you realize that everyone around the table already saw it? That’s how fast content moves around the web, Pinterest “pins” are being shared on Facebook, Tumblr posts are being retweeted on Twitter and many pieces of content get their 15 minutes of fame. Internet fame is temporary; people flock from one meme or trend to another within hours and from one social network to another within minutes.

But it’s not only memes that spread like wildfire across the web; it’s also news, opinions, and other worldly topics and discussions. Everyone has their own micro-community they live in – tech, sports, cars, cooking, motherhood. News spreads. And fast. 24/7. Those who care about it will know about it. In this environment, brands need to be agile. How can they connect with their audience in the moment they care the most (or at least just care)?

To understand just how fast a topic can emerge and recede online, take the recent example of the release of a new trailer for the hit game Call of Duty [see graph below].  The Trailer's announcement on May 1st was greeted with an immediate surge of interest and discussion on Twitter.  Within less than 24 hours, the conversation shifted from Twitter to a high level of comment activity on YouTube.  In real time, users shifted their behavior from a discovery platform in Twitter, to a viewing and discussion platform in YouTube.  Even more compelling is the fact that the topic almost entirely receded in less than 48 hours.  In a total arc of just 72 hours, a compelling piece of content was discovered, consumed, and discarded.

So what tools are available to help marketers crack the real-time nut?  Technology companies like Baynote and SocialFlow, for example, help marketers make decisions about what content to release and when based on their followers’ real-time conversations.  Companies like Motista and WiseWindow gather social media data to analyze real-time trends around brands and products.

Although, often, it takes more than available tools and technologies, digital marketers need to shift their way of thinking and campaign strategies to reflect how quickly interests shift online. They need to listen and move in real-time.

To paraphrase Darwin, it’s about being responsive. And fast. Really, really fast.

Although I would love to say my “Which Laundry Detergent REALLY Works the Best?” experiment led me on a path of groundbreaking discoveries, I reluctantly decided to walk away from my love for science.  Lucky for me, my past love for science and my current passion for marketing are colliding.

Now I know the idea of combining science and marketing can sound like oil and water to some marketers but ‘Big Data Marketing’ is proving to be a major game changer for how brands engage with their customers.

Let’s start with the birds’ eye view.  Big data marketing allows a company to use all of the data they have about their customers to then influence specific behaviors – behaviors that align with some key objective such as driving purchases, increasing satisfaction, or building brand loyalty.  Key to all of this is the ability to classify customers according to how they actually behave and then act in the right context based on the real time behavioral profile of an individual.  The result – companies engage with customers when it matters most i.e., when they have the greatest chance of influencing behavior to drive a desired action.

Similar to that fourth grade experiment, this marketing technique leverages analytics – and in this case heavy duty analytics – with technology that automatically identifies patterns and changes in customer behaviors e.g., how customers engage with your brand and how often, what influences certain behaviors, which offers work best and in what contexts, how likely customers are to repeat past behaviors, how likely a customer’s friends are to behave in similar ways, etc.   It goes beyond grouping customers into segments to looking at customers as individuals.  And just as important, it allows marketers to act more intelligently based on having a longitudinal view of a customer versus a mere snapshot in time.

In order to know how to influence desired behavior you have to know how customers actually behave.  What big data marketing does is leverage continual behavioral patterns and multiple layers of context to determine – in an automated fashion – how and when it’s best to engage with a customer.   So a customer visits your website using their mobile device during lunch.  But you know that their preference is to make purchases from their PC while at home during the evening.  Shouldn’t this latter piece of data influence how you engage them?

Understanding customer behavior over time is key.   In high school I was on the track team.   My coach could have said (but never did), “Glenn, I’d like you to run the mile.”  I had the same build and size as another guy on the team.   A guy that ultimately won at State.   So why did he not push me to run the mile?  Because I was terrible at it.  Over weeks and weeks of observation, under varying conditions (contexts), my coach realized there was no way this kid was ever going to get to a sub 5:30 mile - so he didn’t even try.   He saved himself and, fortunately, me a lot of pain.  I actually became a sprinter and long jumper.

Most marketers only use static profiles - let’s call it “little data” - to determine how to market to customers.  And unlike my high school track coach, get painful results.

Going back to my laundry science experiment, I remember checking to see (and documenting) twice per day which detergents were having the greatest impact on my ketchup, grass and red wine stains.   If I missed one evaluation time, my experiment would be faulty.

Unfortunately, monitoring the behaviors and results of hundreds or thousands of mobile users is not quite as simple as checking in on five white t-shirts twice per day.   And with mobile data usage growing by the minute, it’s not going to get any easier.

The reality is most tools being used by marketers today were not built with mobile or big data marketing in mind.   They can’t handle the gathering, analyzing, or monitoring of such voluminous amounts of data.  They don’t have the degree of automation necessary to automatically and without intervention identify and act upon changes in customer behavior.  And they don’t have a closed feedback loop which allows a marketer to iterate and rapidly optimize based on real-world learning.

The beauty of true big data marketing technology is its ability to produce rich insights as to what is working and what is not – so that you can rapidly optimize your results.   If you’re able to quickly determine that certain offers delivered in certain contexts perform better – that is, positively influence the desired behavior – than other pairings that may actually have a negative effect on the desired action, then you can continuously optimize your marketing efforts.

For those of us in the world of marketing, the words ‘data’ and ‘analytics’ can suggest a manual process of trying to determine ‘what will work best’ but it’s time to move to the new generation of marketing.   Big data marketing offers a deep understanding of how customers are behaving and allows brands to act on that understanding when it matters most – to drive dramatically better results.  Customers receive more relevant communications and companies are able to influence specific behaviors that positively impact revenues and retention.

This intersection of big data and marketing – what some are calling “scientific marketing” – is exactly what brands need to help maximize customer value.  There is no doubt that digital channels offer marketers new ways to engage with customers, but the ability to turn big data into actionable behavioral insight to then engage with customers in a personal, more relevant way is a lynchpin to success.

Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, Tide was the clear winner.

One of the first questions I ask each of my prospective clients is how many of their customers purchase more than once? Nine out of ten times they have no idea.  Working with our clients to review their customer data, we found that a mere 15 percent of their online customers purchased more than once.  Isn’t that information you would want to know about, and act upon?

As an online retailer, you have access to metrics and analytics that can be very powerful when used in the context of email marketing; something that every retailer uses, but typically not to its fullest potential. You have years of customer order history, crucial data that can help you segment your customers and which may be used to deliver more targeted marketing campaigns.  These campaigns happen to deliver 30 percent higher conversions than batch emails according to a recent Forrester report. That’s a significant increase to your bottom line.

You can also easily access click-stream data, behavioral data that allows you to view what consumers are doing on your site and identify their interests. When coupled with order history, click-stream data enables you to understand your customers’ interests and intent to purchase, which enables you to send behaviorally targeted email campaigns that drive significantly more conversions, revenue and customer value. In some cases when this data was employed I’ve seen conversion rates upward of 50 percent and revenue increases of more than 30 percent—both of which increase customer value.

Now that I’ve outlined some of the data examples that would provide value to eCommerce clients, let me illustrate how this can be implemented to increase customer value by using your customers’ order history and click-stream data information. Customer A has purchased 4 times; however, her last purchase was more than 160 days ago.  Customer B is new and just purchased for the first time last week. Customer C purchased once but it’s been 60 days since that purchase.  Each of these customers could become one of your best customers, or could be lost. So how do you treat them?

It’s clear that the messaging should be different to each of these customers. A has lapsed, but was once very active. This customer may need an incentive to buy again and the messaging should promote items similar to what they’ve purchased in the past. Customer B, on the other hand, is new to your world and should be welcomed. Use a welcome series or post purchase campaign to request a product review, recommend complimentary products or even include an offer to prompt that ever so important second purchase. And finally, Customer C deserves a different kind of message. The purchase is recent enough that she probably doesn’t require any incentive, but maybe a product recommendation will prompt another sale.

We all know that data can be daunting if you’re not sure how to use it to your advantage to deliver value; however, there are accessible and effective ways for you to employ your data to deliver real ROI and ultimately contribute to your bottom line.

Full disclosure: We’re in the travel business. But it’s not our only business. We saw substantial increases month-to-month for our audience-targeting platform over the past 12 months. In fact, we have almost 250 million individual customer data profiles. But this not an individual success story. This is a vertical success story. The success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated, and should be duplicated as brands like P&G, Unliever and GM increase the acceleration of their overall budgets from offline to online spend. Kantar Media reported in November, “the display spending gain of 12.9 percent and 8.6 percent spike in search (for 2011) were driven by travel, local service and insurance categories.”

We know from other data that offline spending for travel was flat. The conclusion: the migration rate for travel from offline to online spending is more rapid than most any other category, from the best data we can gather. Now, think about other verticals. Automotive is coming on but is still TV focused. Pharma is ready to start a vertical migration, but privacy concerns continue to hold it. There are other ways in which the success of the travel ad vertical can be duplicated.  A closer look shows the following five market conditions and marketing activities that have made travel an effective vertical to copy:

Loyalty culture: Ever since the debut of the first frequent flyer program 30 years ago, travel marketing has centered around loyalty programs. Loyalty programs live and breathe on the effective collection and usage of customer data. This loyalty culture has migrated very easily online. Example: Starwood enhanced its loyalty program on Feb. 1 for its top tier customers. It recently reported that just 2 percent of travelers drive 30 percent of Starwood’s profits. With that in mind, the company spent the last three years building a customized online service to better understand the needs and desires of these guests. It is built into the DNA of every travel company. Other verticals can learn from this. Loyalty programs at the very least generate more useful customer  data if they don’t generate incremental sales. Data can drive digital marketing.

Partnerships: Travel companies partner very effectively and cooperate on many levels. It goes beyond the car rental company that partners with the airline, or the hotel chains that partner with the restaurant franchise. They learn from each other at conferences and through other partnerships. Now, other verticals have approached this. In fact, the entertainment business has pulled off many effective CPG partnerships. But none of them share information at the depth that the travel industry does.

Retention: Travel companies use digital marketing to keep and grow customer activity. It’s the laser focus of their efforts online. They have a handle on what it takes from an offer, discount and partner perspective to keep a customer coming back. Branding is a secondary focus for travel companies. Customer retention is job one, and they continue to commit to improvements. Seems to me that the automotive and retail business could take a lesson here.

Efficiency: Economic pressure and media efficiencies have forced travel companies to digital media. Gas prices are up, business travelers can connect virtually and they have to fight for their business. So digital media is not only more efficient and effective, it is a necessity to maintain mind share.

Targeting: Travel companies don’t want everybody.  Emirates Air doesn’t want the discount traveler for its high-priced first class section. Holiday Inn isn’t going after the billionaire that wants a luxury suite. They have an informed profile of the customers they want and digital has proven to be the natural platform for accessing them.

Loyalty, partnerships, retention, efficiency and targeting are well within the control of any company. Some larger economic forces have played into the travel budget move. But the big airlines and hotel chains in particular have raised their stake in digital marketing. As other verticals look for a blueprint to follow, travel has a good flight plan.

The actual responsibilities of a social media department vary from agency to agency, but when that department becomes an integrated part of the internal agency structure, the benefits will be felt across all departments. So why should a social media department be more integrated?

CHANGE: Given the inherent need to innovate quickly, agencies need to adapt just as fast. With Facebook’s “fail fast” mentality, there are no guarantees about what will stick and what will fall to the wayside. In addition to platform changes, there are user changes with new sites and habits, and naturally, it becomes difficult for any agency to stay 100% on top of all emerging trends and changes. A social department that is linked into insider knowledge of these rapid and frequent changes and social trends provides a competitive edge for an agency. Take the recent Timeline and Graph Object changes that were just put in place. Without staying ahead of the curve and being able to anticipate these platform iterations, media and creative opportunities would have been missed.

EDUCATION: About 40% of our job is educating our clients, creatives and other agency employees about new technologies, platforms and APIs. We’ve learned that over-education is key for all facets of the business, so that everyone understands 1) what success in the social space looks like and 2) the necessity for a long-term, integrated strategy that accommodates for earned, owned and paid media rather than a quick win.

CHALLENGING IDEAS: The second a team becomes complacent, “group think” tends to take control and everyone becomes a lemming. A diverse team, with creative, media and social media department members ideating collaboratively, brings differing opinions that challenge ideas and strategies, making executions unique and disruptive in what is becoming a highly homogeneous and saturated market. Whether it’s someone calling Pinterest the “equivalent to tinsel on a Christmas tree because it gets more and more lame as time wears on,” or even our core strategies, without disruption and disagreement there is no progress or evolution to be had.

COHESIVE IDEATION: With the proliferation of social elements across all media channels, social media teams, more than ever, need to work directly with brand planners, creatives and developers. They help identify APIs, platform priorities and KPIs so that when it comes time to ideate a creative execution, a social layer can be accommodated for, regardless of which medium the idea will live in. This proliferation is reliant on a cohesive solution to a brand problem that can also live in different spaces like TV AND Facebook. It takes working very closely as an integrated team to bring an idea to life, engineered to create the largest digital WOM footprint possible.

BRAND CONSISTENCY: Social media allows a brand to cultivate a genuine online persona, personifying the brand in a way that no other medium can. The social media department helps to create cohesive social executions by ensuring that the brand personality is consistent across all channels. There’s nothing worse than reading a Facebook update from a brand and having that tone not accurately reflect the brand voice. This discrepancy usually happens when brands outsource their social copywriting.

DATA: As social marketers, we have a treasure trove of data available to us—it’s essentially the closest marketers can get to consumers, short of jumping into our consumers’ heads. But once again, data (no matter how much of it) is useless unless it is contextualized to bring actionable insights to all aspects of a marketing endeavor. When social insights can be shared with all departments in an agency, true marketing kismet materializes: brand planners can better position the brief, media planners can make more accurate buys based on the target, copywriters can be informed on what taglines perform best, and brand insights that no one ever thought possible begin to arise. Altogether creating a campaign that is not only efficient but also sure to truly resonate with the audience that should matter the most to a brand—its fans.

Tweet me @christuff.

So many companies have developed sophisticated technology to automate campaign performance.  The problem is that no matter how good your technology, you still need statistical relevance to make decisions.  Statistical relevance requires volume, and volume costs money.  Asking an advertiser to spend a lot of money to “see” if something works is just not a proposition that goes over well.  On the other side, companies that take display deals on a CPA basis have to decide how much to spend to find that sweet spot.

That’s where the art comes in.  If technology can rapidly adjust your landscape and offer visibility, the human mind can determine how to jump to the next level without wasting a lot of money.  Sites, creative, frequency capping—all levers that can be played with to find that balance of volume and performance.

There are so many variables that it becomes a tangled web.  Take the “transition impression” concept.  When you first enter a site, you have yet to engage in the content, which means that an ad has a much better chance of making an impact on you.  Once you have engaged with the site, you are less likely to be distracted by extraneous content, such as advertising.

The analogy we use here at Underdog Media is one about driving a car. Consider these two scenarios: making a turn vs. driving straight ahead.  If you are making a turn, you are very engaged in your surroundings and more likely to notice things, like a pedestrian, that might effect your actions.  While driving straight, you are less likely to notice things going on around you.

Optimization is art and science.  Transition impressions—and their impact on performance—are just one example of the multitude of variables that must be considered to maximize ROI.

Lego is actually my favorite activity with the kids. Sometimes we just build one of the elaborate Star Wars or Harry Potter sets, but more often than not, we create structures that come purely out of their imaginations. We always find that the success of these creations can be traced to two key elements. One: Assemble a vibrant collection of different and unique Lego parts. Two: Organize them so key elements are easy to find and use. When you have those two states, you can build creations that are unexpected, delightful, and completely different than you had originally planned.

This is such an apt analogy to the state of online targeting right now. There are currently no lack of platforms and providers of data and technology in the space. And many of them are focused on helping advertisers or publishers to collect, aggregate and use standardized sets of data. From this comes the ability to create broad and (hopefully) differentiated audience segments for online targeting. But this is like playing with an incomplete set of Lego blocks. Or if you have kids, one of those sets where a large percentage of those blocks have found their way under beds, into vacuum cleaners and other black holes of toys you can’t find. What happens when you need that special online behavior, or that special action which indicates high levels of interest? What about when basic site behaviors or conversion pages don’t tell the whole story about the shopping cycle or lifestage of a consumer?

This is where the value of large data volumes comes into play, and where a structured, organized process for collecting and using granular data is a huge asset and advantage as part of a targeting strategy. Notice that I used the word “asset.” Data should always be an opportunity for online marketers, not an obstacle. Just as the goal of my kids and me is to build out a durable, creative Lego asset collection, it should be the goal of any online marketer to follow industry best practices to build their valuable data asset with every relevant and actionable audience attribute possible. To this end, I see three critical changes that need to happen for online marketers:

1. Move beyond basic building blocks. The real fun with Lego comes when you get past the standard pieces that make up the majority of a structure and move into the trim, corner pieces and even decorative blocks – the details that really make it exceptional. Once you decide you want to move beyond basic data building blocks, and basic audience definitions, it’s important to consider what other data elements are valuable in online targeting. The truth is, there’s no lack of actionable online data.
2. Try new things. Often when building a Lego set, there are pieces which don’t seem to fit, or designs that don’t make sense until the final structure is in place. It’s the same with audience targeting – as marketers build their audiences, it’s not always the most straight-forward set of rules that make the most sense. Removing pre-conceived notions, testing and continually reiterating the audiences is the way to ensure you’re always moving forward.
3. Play nicely with everyone. There are no ethics or rules with Lego. At least not written ones. But there are the unspoken principles of sharing and cooperation. In the audience targeting business, rules are a bit more strict and sensitive, as well they should be. Using targeting technology to benefit and delight consumers is key. Cooperating and engaging with groups like the IAB and NAI will help communicate the positive elements of using audience targeting technology. Integrating with worthy technology partners is also key to creating the most successful structure for clients.

Embrace the excitement and opportunity of building your own data asset structure. And be sure to use every piece available, and your company will be on target for 2012.