Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

One of the fun aspects of every Omniture Summit is the product enhancement announcements. Much like an Apple release, web analyst geeks nervously await the new goodies to arrive with much anticipation. This year's announcements focused on 2 aspects. Both are pretty significant. 

The first is a Display Targeting Solution for Advertisers. Essentially, Omniture is allowing advertisers to leverage the data collected onsite to run offsite advertising. By using the onsite data, advertisers can create more targeted ads based on customer segments. Segments could include groups of visitors that exhibited certain behaviors such as viewing specific content or abandoning a cart or other information you know about a visitor such as source of traffic, browser type, geography, etc.

Example of how this works...say you have a group of visitors that have put Widget A in their shopping cart but for whatever reason hasn't purchased it yet. Using that knowledge, Omniture can generate targeted display ads (banners) on other websites that are geared towards closing the deal. Whether its better messaging, different offering, more relevant imagery...it can be customized to that audience. Additionally, using some of Omniture's other products like Test & Target, advertisers can do A/B and Multivariate testing to figure out which creatives generate the best results.

Or let's say you are a non-commerce site, you could leverage the data about what kinds of content a visitor group consumes, and push targeted ads that appeal to those visitors based on what they've read in the past or what other visitors have also looked at. 

Previously you could do something similar with DoubleClick's Spotlight functionality but that was always somewhat limited. This solution offers much more promise based on the richness of the data collected for segmentation.  

Segmentation, targeting and relevancy is the name of the game these days when it comes to your website and the content you are showing to visitors. Technologies like this allow for you to be a lot more precise in your marketing as opposed to carpet-bombing everyone with the same message.

The second major integration Omniture announced is with Facebook. Even better, that integration is free. By leveraging an API connection, some of the interesting data Facebook is collecting can be brought into Omniture and combined with the data you are collecting about your site.

What do I mean by interesting data? Facebook has a ton of demographic information such as gender, age, interests, groups, etc that can be brought into Omniture Sitecatalyst and used for drilling down into the data. You can find out what age groups are checking out your content, what gender likes product A, what kinds of interests generated sales, and so on. So from a customer intelligence perspective, this is huge. Facebook has 130 million users and with that its probably the largest collection of demographic data in the world.

Not only can this data be leveraged inside of the reporting in SiteCatalyst, but also used to create segments to advertise within Facebook. So again, suppose you have a group of visitors that have checked out certain content on your website, you can re-target those visitors on Facebook with relevant ads. 

The one lingering question I have on this is whether you can see all the demographic info of all Facebook visitors that come to your site or only fans of your brand. Obviously, the latter becomes less useful since you might only have 200 fans of your brand. But if it is everyone, this is the holy grail of marketers based on the sheer size of Facebook users.

Just to reiterate a point I make a lot in discussions, we aren't tracking you as an individual but in aggregate. We don't know John Smith is the one on our site doing these activities, instead we see you as some long visitor id like CWXY-1323-2233jd-45jasd. So the passing of data between these disparate systems shouldn't be a cause for concern from privacy advocates. It anonymous. What we are doing is leveraging the aggregate information to create segments for targeting and relevancy.

With both of these major integrations it is obvious what Omniture is trying to achieve, a campaign optimization platform. Omniture already has tools that optimizes content and website design. This is the next logical step, taking your online (and offline) advertising and developing technology to help marketers optimize their budgets to generate the best results. Additionally, the integrations are making it easier to create custom segments based on cross-site knowledge which will ultimately allow marketers to pinpoint their marketing and improve conversion.

Once Omniture cracks the code on campaign attribution and cross-channel influences and combines with these products, they are going to be on to something extremely powerful. Essentially, Omniture could become your campaign planning/media mix tool.  

Exciting times in the world of online marketing. 

For other posts on the Omniture Summit (and more to come over the next 48 hours):

Post 1

Post 2  

So it turns out that I lied somewhat about maintaining a semi-live blog during the Omniture Summit 2010. It proved too difficult with everything going on and because the battery life of my laptop didn't really allow for it. If anyone was jonesing for information during the Summit, you could have followed my assault on Twitter. I think I had in the neighborhood of 125 tweets in a span of 2 days. Insane. 

So now I am back in Raleigh and beginning to transcribe my handwritten notes (the ones that I can actually read) into digestible pieces for the Capstrat blog. 

I was really interested to see how the Summit was going to change after the Adobe acquisition. Once the doors opened for the general session, I could see it was the same look and feel as previous events. I've always likened it to a web analytics rock concert, complete with huge monitors and loud music, and this one didn't disappoint.

Opening session saw Josh James (head of Adobe's Omniture business unit) welcome everyone to the summit. In his opening monologue, he mentioned that we are in the midst of the Industrial Revolution of Data and that this was the decade of the CMO. Successful CMO's are going to need to:

1. Create engaging experiences
2. Unify and personalize consumer interactions across channels
3. Make the leap from marketing metrics to business metrics
4. Inform other business functions and invert accountability 

Just when I thought that the Aten Design Group took home the prize for social media tactics, new information has caused me to reconsider the verdict. Yesterday I wrote about the funeral service for Internet Explorer 6 . I praised the Aten Design Group for playing off of Google's actions to create some buzz about their company. Of course, all of this was at Microsoft's expense and they responded in classy form. (Did I just say that Microsoft did something classy?  Yes, I believe I did.)

The Microsoft Blog from the Seattle P-I has reported that Microsoft sent flowers to the IE 6 funeral. The card read:

Thanks for the good times IE6, see you all @ MIX when we show a little piece of IE Heaven.

The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft 

This is such a great response on the part of Microsoft and proof that it's better to play along with social media, than it is to fight it. In the words of Nick Eaton from Seattle P-I, "Touché, Microsoft. Touché."

Kaiser Health News posted a terrific article today debunking the popular -- but utterly misguided -- notion that repealing health insurers' limited anti-trust exemption will reduce health care costs.  It is remarkable to me that members of Congress and public option fans are so passionately devoted to a concept that is obviously a red herring upon even a cursory review of the facts.

The authors – a Seattle anti-trust attorney and a Boston University health economist – also point out that overregulation on the health insurer side could well have the unintended effect of raising health care costs if it tips market balance in favor of large hospitals and provider groups.

Eighty to eighty five cents on the premium dollar goes to hospitals, doctors and drug companies.  No matter how unpopular insurers are, their cut just isn't big enough to significantly change health care costs no matter how hard you squeeze it.

We need health care reform -- not just health insurance reform.

Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as "IE6," is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.

While IE 6 isn't going away any time soon, this is a great example of how a small company can make waves by playing off the actions of a larger one. The funeral was inspired by Google ending IE 6 support in Google Docs. That plus a general disdain for IE 6 amongst the Web community led to what is sure to be a successful event in Denver and already some great media coverage at CNN and other outlets.

I look forward to seeing the reaction later today, but until then you can enjoy this photo of IE 6 in the urn. All of you who attended Ignite Raleigh last night know exactly what I'm talking about.