Blow me away Charles Haggerty! Your post on iMedia Connection, Maximize Return with a Marketing Model written in the style of John Stuart Mills, utopian and inspiring. As I read the article I kept wondering what agency you hailed from and was only disappointed to track back and see that you were with iProspect, a premium SEM company. As I read your article I thought to myself, if this guy can do what he is talking about, this is the agency for my clients!
Charles described the ultimate multi-channel marketing analysis process, all hail-the consolidated, holistic view into all aspects of a marketing campaign. Some of what Charles describes does exist. He describes 800-number analysis, direct-mail tracking and of course online tracking. Interactive as the best capabilities as most of us already know. Search, banner campaigns and email all have great insight into what is effective and what is not. Integration of site analytics like Omniture, Webside Story and WenTrends with Ad Serving is the next step (see my post on Let’s Talk About Technical Extensibility – Making Things Better). This is what is coming next and I will write more on it soon. DirectServe technology, first party ad serving from any partner, can bleed log file data to a site analytics provider and stream data about acquisition marketing to customer analytics. This will close the loop in the online space.
Multi-channel marketing tool sets are on the market. Blackfoot Analytix built on an Oracle platform comes close to doing it on many levels and Theorem is another one that incorporates human and systematic analysis to create a holistic view into multichannel marketing. There are others out there but like Charles said, there is not a complete toolset, yet.
Of course to cost of analysis is an issue. Being able to have a clear view of how someone became a customer where they saw an ad in a magazine, heard about a product on the radio, saw an ad online and then clicked on a search term is difficult to measure CPA. We may never get there. My recent post, Search and Networks: Better Together – I Think So! suggests a mechanism of leveraging first party ad serving to combine search and banner advertising with behavioral targeting to get an accurate CPA measurement. So at least there is a stronger view in the online space. Couple that with what I describe above, a web site analytics tool, and the holistic interactive view is there.
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