The rumors started flying today about the possibility of a Microsoft and Yahoo merger, which immediately got me thinking about what that could mean to the online media landscape and to my clients in particular.

When you look at the potential marriage through a business lens it’s hard to believe they would even consider it given this new online media giant would not measure up to the sum of it’s parts. This is all about ego. You can hear the echoes from some testosterone filled boardroom in Redmond “we can’t just let this happen…we have to be the biggest”

Consider the Yahoo home page which is their most valuable media asset today gets up to 120MM impressions per day. The MSN home page also their most valuable asset reaches about the same number of folks. There is a tremendous amount of overlap in these audiences, but you do get the benefit of frequency if you buy both.

If you collapsed these two into one huge portal it simply would not be as valuable to me as an advertiser. The other angle is positive competition. I believe Yahoo has made MSN better. I don’t believe Microsoft would have developed some of their great new ad targeting capabilities etc. had not Yahoo been handing it to them in that area. I could go on about how client support and service etc. would suffer, but I know this is about business.

You could argue that Microsoft could simply keep both brands separate which would make better business sense, but whose kidding who this is not about logic. It’s about being bigger than Google.

Lets start by killing the word user. User is a term IT guys have chosen it’s perfectly impersonal just like IT likes it. A “user” is actually a real person, they have souls, they have feelings, they have hopes and dreams and yes they have needs. A marketer would never refer to a customer or a prospect as a “user”.

(Guest Rant by Matt Z)
All’s fair in love and war. And business. Especially ours.

With a new interactive player popping up seemingly over night – each and every night - the battle for business is escalating. And getting bloodier pitch-by-pitch. The dead and wounded litter the columns of Adweek and AdAge on a regular basis. But we have seen the enemy. In fact, we often frequent the same Starbucks.

We work in a fuzzy, gray, incestuous industry, where we seem to swap roles and agencies with friends and former co-workers with the same frequency and relish that Jenna Jameson swaps co-stars (for edification, Jenna Jameson is an extremely successful adult film star – or so I hear).

But where does your allegiance lie? Does it lie with the friend who was once the creative ying to your yang? The Wallace to your Gromit? Or, does it now firmly reside with the company that enables you to pay for your house, your white chocolate mocha’s, your Jenna Jameson Collector’s Edition Boxed Set?

I mean, what do you do when your friend is also your enemy?

In short, you do what Sonny did in The Godfather, after they tried to kill his old man: You “go to the mattresses.”

You prepare for a war.

You arm yourself with killer account people. Bolster your defenses with deadly accurate creatives. Lock-and-load with media mercenaries. Send in the technology troopers and the strategy snipers because the battle is raging. And the first casualty is friendship.

An account goes up for review and you can almost smell the blood in the air (aka marketing dollars). You know the footage you see on Animal Planet of a lame zebra limping through the shimmering heat of the Serengeti? And then you see a couple of lionesses slowly, stealthily following the zebra? That’s our business. In fact, the only difference is that our world is a bit more cutthroat (and when you consider that we’re talking about creatures that actually tear out throats, that’s really saying something). The pitch teams are being formed, the vultures are circling, creative is on high alert, and the lions – well – they’ve got company: Hyenas.

The most obvious driver of dysfunction or inefficiencies within a marketing organization is misaligned goals and incentives. The clearest and most common example I run across when working with clients is the user experience vs. online marketing battle. You may not know it exists, but if you do any business online it most likely does.

Here is a quick way to see if you have a problem that may be gating your success:

1. Is there a group or person who is responsible for designing, building, and updating your company’s website?
2. Is there a group or person who is responsible for acquiring, cross-selling & retaining customers online for your brand?
3. Are these TWO separate people or groups?

In some organizations IT is still responsible for the website, in many others there is a “specialized” group who is responsible for user (I hate the word user) or customer experience and who may or may not leverage IT to heavy technology lifting. Most companies have grown past the first scenario of IT solely owning the site and have brought in some sort of customer experience function in house and I commend them for that.

Where that plan breaks down is marketing. I strongly believe a website today is a marketing platform not an online brochure, and certainly not simply an online application. Consider your physical RETAIL space, and your virtual RETAIL space obviously have some differences, but they typically have one common goal RETAILING.

In the physical world the facilities group does not have “full control” of the store, there is more to the store than carpet, wallpaper and plumbing. There is no mistaking that it’s all about making those cash registers ring and putting smiles on customers faces. You have security issues (remember Winona Rider). You have complex systems like inventory management, terminals, servers etc., but you never hear “Keep the marketing department out of our turf…this is beyond them”