I got some great feedback on my last blog post, “Why Advertising is Irrelevant.” It has spurred some great discussions with people I admire and who’s opinion I respect. I have to admit I wanted to be provocative because of the tired old approach of blanketing the earth with ad copy to get my attention, or worse, reading about work that puts gold statues on agency shelves but doesn’t help the client.

That said, I think I need to decamp for a moment. Everything in the marketing mix has it’s time and place. A TV ad still is probably the best choice for quickly gaining general awareness for some consumer audiences. My point is that we’ve got to start thinking differently.

Our goals as marketers should be to come up with great creative work, but it needs to be more driven by consumer input than ever before….and I don’t mean the kind of input that chooses the ending of Hollywood movies. I am talking using a measurement-driven marketing model to make the appropriate choices at the appropriate times by using input gathered from your customers.

This is easy to write about in a blog, but much more difficult to implement. This is hard stuff for most companies. Even most consultants who are talking about measurement-driven marketing, only get a piece of the puzzle (the left brain or the right) but can’t put the entire picture together in their own consulting company, let alone with the clients. You know as well as I do that internal silos, management structures and lack of clear directives are keeping measurement practices from gaining ground in most companies.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this problem and have been developing some alliances around this involving management consultant, analytics tools and design and development practices that are helping companies gain customer insight through metrics to improve marketing effectiveness. To steal a phrase from Mike Ackmann, one of our favorite consultants, the goal is “Data, not Drama.”

To meet this goal, we’ve crafted a different approach:

1) Strategy Integration
Develop integrated strategies involving key stakeholders across all disciplines in the company. Involving Marketing, Operations, HR, Finance, Technology and Sales.

2) Profitability Practice
Develop processes and practices to integrate customer interaction data into actionable business intelligence across the organization. We translate what is happening out there in the marketplace to what it means for your business.

3) Practical Application
Start simple. Measure what you can today and begin to develop a measurement/profitability practice within your organization. This applies to technology we choose as well. We look for the simplest, most cost-effective tools and technology to get the job done. Learn more about getting started ……

If the pundits on Wall Street talk about your industry, will the rest of the world listen?

Good news for the analytics sector today. With all the talk of Web 2.0, YouTube, Google, Yahoo, and others, it’s nice to see that someone is paying attention to the web analytics sector.

It’s not just the content creators that are making waves these days. The people that measure and track how that content is used are also causing a nice ripple in the financial markets.

CNN reports that Wall Street is sitting up and taking notice of the performance gains of companies like Omniture and WebSide Story, as they continue to extend their measurement platforms and reach into the latest Internet boom.

What’s surprising about this is the validation that the web analytics industry is starting to receive from sources outside its own walls. It wasn’t too long ago that the investment community was bashing Omniture for burning through $40 million in funding trying to bolster its workforce and infrastructure. In mid-2006 they looked like another IPO-focused tech company with little or nothing to show for the infusion except more people and a dwindling client list.

WebSide Story has made some noise, too. Their acquisition of Visual Sciences from the grips of tight relationships with Uncle Sam and the men in black has moved from a “how-do-we-really-sell-this-product” to an earnings rainmaker for HBX. Wall Street is predicting 31% earnings growth next year, and 35% average yearly growth for the next few years after that.

All numbers aside, this obviously is good news for shareholders of both Omniture and WebSide Story. But the real question is, now that Wall Street has given a stamp of approval on these types of services, does that mean that web analytics has now been validated for the rest of the online world?

Increases in earnings and stock price can be indicative of a company’s ability to provide tangible results for its clients and a valuable set of tools and services that impart value to digital marketing intelligence. Whether that intelligence impacts day to day tactics or longer term strategies, it is clear that the growth of these companies directly relates to the growth they’re bringing to their clients.

Will this financial success be enough to cause CEO’s, Directors, and other decision makers to expand their digital strategies to include marketing intelligence? Wall Street seems to think so.

The Other Online Ad Boom via [CNNMoney.com]

As with any major upgrade of a software package or online service, people are bound to ask “Is this merely evolution or a revolution”? We hear it about Microsoft products all the time, but now the question is firmly pointed at Google’s re-release of its popular (and free) web analytics platform - Google Analytics.

If you’re familiar with the traditional GA interface it’s clear that the first major change is in the way the data is presented. Gone are the hard, tree-like menu structures. Instead, the console now sports a familiar Web 2.0-type theme - drag and drop functionality, interactive menus and widgets, and cleaner spacing.

The second major change is….wait….just a sec….oh yeah. That’s about it.

What? No drum rolls? No fanfares?

Sorry folks. This one is more evolution than revolution.

There are those who would argue the interface overhaul represents enough of a change to qualify this upgrade as a revolution rather than a simple evolution of the service, and to some degree there is credence in that statement. Cleary, Google spent some serious time thinking about how to make the GA experience a much more fulfilling and informative one, and to that end they’ve succeeded. Although it takes a little getting used to, there are some handy upgrades available that make traversing web data easier and more intuitive.

However, when all the gloss, glitz, and glamour is removed, what’s left? Underneath the Ajax, Flash, and softer font faces lies the same basic tool - a wonderfully powerful web analytics platform that does a fantastic job of tracking ankle-high and knee-deep analytics information, but unfortunately that’s about it.

At the heart of GA lies the Urchin core - and robust as it is, it’s still not the home-run web marketers were hoping for. Improving the user experience of looking at data is very helpful, but it’s still the same data we’ve been looking at for a long time.

“Silo” is a popular term used in business these days. Most often it describes tactics, strategies, or data that cannot or is not integrated within the whole of an organization. Usually, if something is in a silo, it’s not a good thing. How many times have you heard about a department or group in your organization operating in a silo, ignoring everyone else and going off on their own tangent?

The digital world is no different, and today there’s a new addition: the “analytics silo of death”. This gruesome, dark place is where all web analytics initiatives eventually end up if neglected, ignored, or left alone to gather dust.

Analytics has often been one of the holy grails of the digital world, the premise being the more a company knows about what’s happening on a website, the more they will be able to understand (and profit from) their customers.

In the past year, Omniture’s IPO, WebSide Story’s acquisition of Visual Sciences, and the tidal wave of Google Analytics have pushed web metrics in to the spotlight. For the first time, businesses of all sizes have access to data that was once beholden only to those with the largest pocketbooks.

Companies flocked to the analytics scene, racing to get their Google Javascript code or the latest version of Site Catalyst. But when the dust settled, has this data really changed the strategic initiatives for anyone?

Sure - visitors were being counted and clickstream data was being gathered, but the PR momentum responsible for this digital version of the gold rush was ultimately responsible for the siloing of analytics.

Too often organizations race to implement an analytics solution by only focusing on the what’s, but not the how’s of digital intelligence, such as “How…..:

• will this data be presented to the organization?
• will this data be integrated within the organization?
• will ROI be determined?
• will this platform be maintained?

The “how’s” aren’t digital or web-centric questions - they’re business questions, and they’re important.

So before getting too excited that Google Analytics is now offering free accounts, figure out the how’s of digital intelligence in your organization so you can keep your analytics out of the silo of death.

Earlier this month Maven Networks partnered with WebTrends to create “the most comprehensive online video analytics offering in the broadband industry”.

This is great news - more things to hook in to analytics platforms and more data that will never make it out of the analytics silo of death.

Not that we’re jaded, or anything.  WebTrends has their work cut out for them.  Sure, they have the backing of the big shot, but just because everyone and their mother has heard about WT, market share isn’t a shoe-in.  They have an established user base, but are these the ones that are going to be using video as a communications/marketing/advertising strategy?