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.

Consumers are ignoring ads like never before and banner blindness is plaguing the industry. Even if consumers were paying attention, many ads wouldn’t be “in view”:  They’re served below the fold, or take longer to load than the time viewers typically spend on the page.

So how can you make sure your ads will be seen? Get ads into the content stream. It’s where you and every other consumer on earth spend the bulk of their time: watching, listening and reading content.

Companies like Vibrant Media create “in-content” brand-discovery solutions that get brand messages into those content streams, where consumers are actually paying attention. These placements are the polar opposite of the old static banner ads that sit quietly in the right rail of the page, just waiting to be ignored. For example, Vibrant has contextually relevant rich-media brand canvases that take all of your great content – such as the social media channels you spent so much sweat and treasure to populate – and bring it into the editorial well, where it’s ready to be discovered by consumers who are interested.

Now that you’re in the content, what are you going to deliver? There will always be a place for “traditional” digital advertising, whether it is a 15-second web video spot or even a banner ad with a simple call to action. However, we have seen that advertising performs best when it delivers genuine value to the consumer. Create ads that are relevant, fun and engaging. Want to do display? Then make it radically different, like this one from Ikea. Reel people in with ads that are contextually relevant, and really useful like these Jeep ads that run alongside news stories and highlight road conditions and weather info.

Much of the buzz around native advertising focuses on branded content or sponsored content, such as what you see on sites like Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post. It is clear this will grow as an opportunity for publishers seeing their revenue squeezed both online and off.

However, not every brand is going to develop its own content shop with a healthy budget. We should hope to see “hundreds of content shops” blossom, whether they are small home-based operations in Brooklyn or big-time offshoots of ad agencies. We’ve already seen some PR firms get into the game.

Whatever its origin, content is the key (along with context, of course) to the hearts and minds of consumers. Ads need to be fun, value-adding, and “content-like,” and they need to be seen to be appreciated. You’ve engaged them, so now you better be engaging.

Let’s face it: mobile advertising still has a long way to go. Facebook finally announced its latest and greatest mobile-ad effort last week, but smart industry folks say it still leaves much to be desired. And even though more money’s flowing toward mobile, the dollars spent on mobile marketing still don’t come close to aligning with the amount of time we spend with smartphones in hand. In fact, some say that the only reason mobile pulls in ad spend is because it’s so  damn cheap.

Even so, it seems inevitable that mobile’s share of spend will continue to increase – if only because it already owns such a significant share of mind. Mobile also has serious potential to perform for marketers. A Nielsen report out this week showed a shorter time to purchase and dramatically higher purchase rates among mobile consumers. And leaders at trailblazing agencies are putting serious effort into setting the mobile agenda for the rest of the marketing world.

Mobile has transcended its role as a connection and convergence device. In the words of Starcom MediaVest Group’s Jesse Missad, “it will be part of every communications plan.”

I spoke with Missad and other industry leaders about their thoughts on mobile. Here are their five rules for the mobile road – actionable insights you can put to work right now:

1. Don’t ask “if,” but “how?” Big brands no longer see the need to justify mobile. Rather, they’re looking for partners who’ve mastered it. The question is not whether you need mobile, but how you can do it well. Altimeter Group analyst Chris Silva harks back to an old lesson of Web 1.0, saying that agencies need to be “mature” about mobile – putting real thought into strategy and technology. The days of building it and hoping they will come are long gone.

2. Mix it up. Faced with a sprawling menu of mobile marketing options – from apps and ads to sites and social media – brands risk getting stuck on one reliable formula. Don’t. Every campaign is different, and there are no one-size-fits-all solutions in today’s world. Consumers expect more than that – as Paul Gelb of Razorfish puts it, “success comes from identifying actionable consumer insights, business objectives and the experiential message to communicate.”

3. Which leads me to my next rule: Know thy customer. Mobile technology brings new possibilities to people’s lives, and new opportunities for marketers to deliver engaging content, messages, value and utility. But it also means that consumers expect an experience tailored to their needs. Central to this, from a marketing perspective, is relevance. Thanks to mobile technology, we can deliver content and advertising experiences that are in truly the interest of the consumer. As Gelb says, when advertising is contextually relevant, users in overwhelming numbers “report not only a positive impression of the ad they saw but also the concept of ad-supported media.”

4. Lead through change. It takes more than a village, but rather a whole industry to spur the changes we need to see in mobile advertising. This will take broad adoption of initiatives by trade groups such as the IAB or MMA, decisive action by top agencies and brands, and widespread adoption of standardized metrics that show how mobile is actually working. Missad says we face a long road ahead. “While progress is being made through mobile ad-server development, publisher adoption of tags, and attitudinal evaluation, measurement is simply not keeping up with consumer realities and proliferation of technology.”

5. Last but not least, put mobile first. Paul Gelb believes that mobile needs to emerge from its silo. “It’s always on,” he says, so find ways to integrate it with TV and brick-and-mortar touchpoints to more holistically engage your consumer. Missad adds: “Reality calls for an integrated approach to mobility, not a separate strategy. Mobile is a full-funnel solution.”

The key takeaway here? Follow these five indisputable rules to spur and accelerate change across our industry. By doing so, we can all work to build an ideal mobile future.

The data speaks for itself. Mobile web usage continues to increase dramatically; more people are buying smartphones and tablets, and taking them online. They’re changing the way we watch TV, experience advertising, and make purchase decisions, both online and in-store.

Thanks to this burgeoning mobile shift, scenarios that seemed futuristic not so long ago are becoming our here-and-now reality. Try this one on for size:

You are woken up by the alarm on your smartphone. As you brush your teeth (with your Bluetooth-connected toothbrush), perhaps you attend to a screen or two that’s integrated into your home – maybe via a smart mirror or smart window. Your screens present you with relevant, custom-curated news and information, tailored to your needs and interests based on the preferences you’ve opted to share with media companies. You grab a 10-Hour Energy – in the future, five hours doesn’t cut it – and you’re out the door on your way to work. All you carry is a smartphone and a tablet. When your cab drops you at your office, you wave your phone to pay. At your desk you place your tablet and smartphone in docks, via which they sync instantly with your office’s information systems. A laser virtual keyboard and Kinect interface allow you to input text and control your computing world with gestures.

Sound crazy? Well, pending a few processor upgrades and an uptick in mobile bandwidth, everything here is entirely plausible using technology that’s widely available right now. That same technology is about to dramatically alter how we shop – online, on Main Street, and at the mall.

Our mobile future is, if not already here, fast approaching. So how can smart marketers make the most of the mobile shift to capture new opportunities for consumer engagement?

Here are a few emerging technologies to keep an eye on:

• Near-Field Communications: This technology, which enables devices in close proximity to communicate, promises to have enormous impact on how we market to consumers. Right now it’s discussed mostly as a mobile-payment platform, which it will be, but it also has great potential to deliver hyper-relevancy and drive engagement. Chris Silva of Altimeter warns, however, that privacy issues will need to be top of mind where near-field communications (NFC) are concerned. And I have to agree with Silva on this point: “I don’t necessarily want a ‘Minority Report’ experience where I’m walking down the street and getting marketed to by name because I passed by a sensor.”

• Digital Bridges: QR codes and other offline triggers often get a bad rap, but along with apps like Viggle and Shazam, they’re invaluable as “bridging” technologies that connect the online and offline worlds via users’ mobile devices. What’s more, they deliver highly qualified ‘clicks’ to marketers – the QR-scanning customer has gone out of her way to engage with you. Now how will you return the favor?

• Device Fingerprinting: Still in its infancy, “device fingerprinting” will allow targeting in a way similar to what a cookie does online. This and other standards will emerge to allow consumers to decide what data they want to share with marketers in exchange for a new level of convenience and relevance. Google and others are looking at new frontiers to integrate data across devices and make mobile even more useful to consumers and brands.

• Showrooming: Brick-and-mortar retailers are likely to suffer the most from the new phenomenon of “showrooming,” where people use their phones to comparison shop online while in retail stores. During the holidays, 52% of shoppers used their phones to conduct research in stores, after which many of them chose to make their purchases online. It’s easy to see how this could escalate into a headache for businesses. Marketers can fight back by building apps or working with companies such as Milo that use offers and recommendations to incentivize store visits and purchases.

• Real-Time Dialogue: Customers aren’t waiting until they get home to review your shop, restaurant, or salon anymore – with geo-enabled apps like Foursquare and Yelp at their fingertips, they don’t have to. Next time you’re in a restaurant, look around. That’s right, look up from your own smartphone and notice how many of your fellow diners are engaged with their phones – looking up a Groupon offer, letting friends know where they are, checking reviews on crowd-sourced – or even (gasp) traditional – media sites. Mobile consumers are social, and they are going with the crowd. Tap into the ratings, feedback, and check-in data your customers so readily provide to open a two-way dialogue. It’ll add up to better consumer engagement, and better business performance.

There’s no question that our transformation to a mobile society is already underway. Broader adoption and better integration of mobile technologies will permanently alter the ways we interact with our customers and with each other. Marketers who understand and embrace this change will remain relevant long into the future.

It’d be an understatement to say that brands have embraced content creation as a marketing strategy. Branded content has become a staple of cross-platform, integrated marketing campaigns everywhere, as a nearly fail-proof way to engage consumers, and turn them into customers. As industry analyst Rebecca Lieb said recently, every single one of the major brands she speaks with is increasing its production of original content.

But am I alone in thinking that maybe it’s enough already? Sooner or later, some savvy startup or sprawling conglomerate has to realize that the long tail is losing its appeal. More isn’t always better, as Sheena Iyengar said in her awesome TED Talk. What we need isn’t customization, but relevance.

So how can we, as marketers, deliver the relevance customers want and need? How can we ensure that our content – whether it’s an article, an ad, or an image – reaches the right consumers in the most relevant and meaningful way?

Behavioral targeting gets part of the job done. Knowing what a potential shopper has recently done online, what sites they visited, what ecommerce channels they browsed gives us a sense of their past behavior, and some indication of what they’re likely to view, see, and buy in the future. But our online lives – like the ones we live in the real world – are complex, and to understand a consumer’s likely intent, we first need to understand his or her contexts.

That’s right – contexts, plural. As Tom Wentworth wrote on Mashable recently, if targeting is to deliver effective results, marketers need to understand changes in consumer context. His example? “You might be a 45-year-old technology manager who likes jazz and runs marathons, but you’re also a husband, a son, an uncle and a friend — and your purchases reflect all those different contexts.”

Smart marketing strategies need to combine behavioral – or “personal” – relevance with contextual relevance.

SoLoMo (social, local, mobile if you’ve somehow avoided it so far) is part of our buzzy jargon now. If you’re doing a social media campaign, think about the contexts. For instance, a young working mom on Pinterest is in the context of seeing popular recipes her friends are cooking, or she’s on LinkedIn researching advice about work/life balance, and on Facebook accepting invitations for a night out with friends. The content is being shaped, controlled, and shared by the user (consumer), but it’s the contexts that marketers need to understand to deliver a message that will resonate with the consumer.

Local creates amazing opportunities to look at context. When I check in on Foursquare, I choose to share my real-time, local context. Brands including Starwood Hotels and History Channel are experimenting with new ways to harness and leverage that data. Others will inevitably follow, as devices (wearable and otherwise) continue to get smarter.

Don’t forget that ALL of this – even the So and the Lo – is mobile. With mobile Internet usage expected to soon surpass desktop, nearly all media consumption is bound to soon be mobile. As a result, contexts will shift ever more fluidly.

It’s overwhelming, sure. But consider the possibilities, both for marketers and for consumers who welcome relevant, personalized brand engagement in the right context. We’re just beginning to glimpse a bit of what the future might hold. Ford and other auto companies are pushing forward with new telematics that can understand consumers’ health and wellness, and Google’s “self-driving” car concept is starting to seem not only sensible, but possibly inevitable. Soon our cars will know where we are, what we like to eat, and when we tend to get hungry. It’s not too hard to imagine our dashboard suggesting we pop off at the next exit for a top-rated BBQ joint.

Exciting, right? And all empowered by context. So let’s not forget that regardless of the platform, whatever the device, and however smart the strategy, content still matters – but relevance and context rule.

Now here’s the bad news. The “Big Five” publishers – Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL – attract a whopping 83% of US online ad spend. Of this group Facebook is expected to dramatically expand its share. New players are attracting more revenue as well. According to Business Insider, they are dominated by a few that are not necessarily thought of as traditional “publishers,” such as Hulu, YouTube, and Twitter.

Add to this the reported Q4 digital-spending cuts, and new pressures from RTB and exchanges, and you’ll get why some publishers are starting to freak out. Exchange- and RTB-driven selling more than doubled in 2011, building fears of channel conflict and depressed CPMs. Further pressure arises from the commoditization of inventory and the agency trading desks.

So, what’s a publisher to do? Join the mad rush to land-grab in mobile? (Still not economically sustainable.) Set up a private exchange or funnel all of your inventory through existing exchanges? (Puts too much value at risk.) Whatever publishers’ options might be, flailing around and pivoting from one business model to the next is clearly not one of them.

Based on over 11 years of making money for publishers, we’ve come up with a real prescription for publisher health to face the all too exciting times ahead in 2012:

• Focus on what you’re not doing. Examine revenue channels you haven’t yet tapped. Over the years you’ve invested in great content, photos, slideshows, and videos. Are you fully monetizing all these opportunities? We work with thousands of premium publishers who found vibrant sources of revenue through new ultra-relevant, non-intrusive ad units – such as in-text, toolbars, and dynamic display – that actually enhance the user’s experience by providing contextually relevant, consistently useful brand advertising. Look beyond your ad units, too – maybe you have data that you could monetize, for instance. With so much spend going to the Big Five, how are you going to grab your piece of the pie? Seek network partners who have strong relationships with top 100 brands who will leverage their strengths to get you the best deals.

• Take tech seriously. Smart publishers dedicate people and resources to maximizing yields and by shopping around, trying out different partners, exchanges, and other revenue opportunities.

• Steal from the best. Why is social media so appealing to advertisers? It’s the interactivity, sharing, and engagement. So what can you learn from someone like Facebook, a platform that’s drawing a substantial10% of the US online ad spend? One thing’s for sure, work with partners who can bring social media engagement to your site and audience. Brands are increasingly looking at unique placements such as social media toolbars that push branded social media content to the context of the bottom of a relevant publisher page, where consumers can engage right then and there, without leaving your site.

• You are the new TV. Numbers don’t lie. Video ad spend online is projected to surpass $7B by 2015, US online video viewers will reach 169 million next year, and 72% of publishers say video will bring them the most revenue (eMarketer). There are a number of ways to approach video. You can choose to throw up a roadblock/interstitial and annoy a user into watching an ad. You can use pre-roll and “reward” users with a bit of premium content later on. Or, you can run ads that are neither distracting nor aggressive. Publishers who work with Vibrant provide user-initiated video ad formats that are immersive and engaging, and developed to support consumer choice. Because of this, they perform for brands and publishers and, of course, for users.

It has been a bumpy few years for online publishers, and the roller-coaster ride will continue. But with the potential of new ad formats and new ad technologies, I think that if we look creatively at solutions that deliver for audiences and for publishers and brands, opportunities for all of us will abound in the year to come.

With so much at stake from now through Christmas – holiday sales represent nearly 20% of retail sales for the whole year – marketers pull out all the stops to get an edge on the competition. For most, that means amping up and ramping up on the digital advertising front. After all, more than 57% of marketers say they rely on digital ads to increase brand awareness and purchases; digital drives a significant amount of both offline retail behavior (through online branding) and online purchasing (through brand and direct-reponse initiatives).

But before we ladle out the eggnog and throw marketing caution to the wind, it’s important to remember that with a few slight tweaks, holiday marketers need to follow the same guidelines this time of year that they do when the fake snow’s not falling. So what’s the hot, new trend for marketers this holiday season? Common sense.

Based on best practices and insight from colleagues around the digital industry, I’ve identified five essential rules to follow for your holiday marketing, guaranteed to see you through to 2012 with nary a regret:

1. Always be relevant. It sounds like Marketing 101, but keeping consumers and their wants, needs, conditions, and situations at the core of what you do will guarantee results. Along with demographic info, you must understand what content your audience is viewing, watching and reading, and align your ads with that content. This year, more than ever, we’re seeing consumers who are not only price-conscious, but also spending-conscious. The better you understand consumers’ circumstances, the better prepared you’ll be to make a strong case for the value and benefits of your product.
2. Context matters – and so does content. What are you serving in your display, toolbar, and in-text ads? Time and again, we see that the most engaging ads offer users relevant content within the context of the page they’re viewing. Maybe you’re marketing a tooth-whitening product, for example. Serve ads that understand the context of a page – whether it’s about finding a date for New Year’s Eve or taking great holiday photos – and change dynamically to give users meaningful information they can use.
3. Serve a need, need to serve. We all know that geo-targeted, locally relevant marketing holds great appeal for brands and consumers (viz. a recent major IPO), so make sure your advertising caters to consumers’ needs. Here’s a cue from retailer Lowe’s, who used a targeted keyword strategy to score big with an award-winning campaign during the holiday season last year. Lowe’s created a custom in-text store locator ad unit that leveraged ShopLocal's robust API feed to deliver geo-targeted product deals within relevant, topical, and seasonal content. Cha-ching!
4. Don’t share your voice, own it. Keyword ownership is everything, especially in auto, consumer electronics and other hyper-competitive sectors. Along with category and brand words, seasonally specific terms like “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” are obvious winners. Act first and fast, and you can let keywords do the work for you. A smart contextual plan gives you access to every relevant nook of the Web without specific spot-buying.
5. Know the channels and work them. It goes without saying that social media is attracting heat and dollars from marketers. Brands look for increased mileage from their social media assets – surfacing social content in new ad formats that push the Facebook page and Twitter feed to the consumer in a relevant context, as opposed to pulling them away to their social media. Last year, Best Buy successfully brought its “Twelpforce” help-desk Twitter feed into relevant content and engagement through customized in-text ad units. And, this year, envelope-pushing brand Axe is using an innovative social toolbar to bring its clever social media content to a broader audience.

Happy holidays, and here’s to a happy and hangover-free marketing season full of common sense, brand lift, and conversions for all!