Many advertisers who are predominantly acquisition focused salivate at the thought of being able to improve their conversion rates and ROI by buying behaviorally targeted media. It’s common sense, for example a car rental client is typically willing to pay a little bit more for impressions that are targeted to “hot prospects”, ones that look like they are ready to rent a car. Seems like a no brain proposition for both the advertiser and the publisher. The publisher yields a bigger profit from their finite inventories, and the advertiser can possibly improve their ROI.

Here is the rub, this is great for the challenger car rental brand with the smaller budget, and it’s deadly dangerous for the dominant brand with the big budget. Consider how the target segments get created. Often the criteria for determining the “Often Rents Cars” or “Interested in Car Rental” universes is anonymous tagging of computers who clicked on rental car ads, or worse rented a car in the last XX days. The first part is based on click tracking of ads that were categorized generically as “car rental”. Imagine that you are the biggest advertiser in this category on this site and you have effectively placed 70% of all the “car rental” ads on this site. Guess what your PROSPECTS are 70% of the so-called anonymous segment that site sells to your competitors. You have just opened the kimono to your competition my friend. The second scenario is even more disturbing because it actually exposes your customers Many big publishers or worse ad networks convince clients to add tracking pixels to their online forms, applications, or booking engines in order to better optimize their media, or to track performance based deals. Now you don’t have to wonder how they can tag a group of people as “Recently rented a Car”.

If you have been following so far and you are the small car rental brand with the small budget you have a huge smile on your face, and if you work at the big bad brand with the big bad budget you are thinking this sucks why cant we take advantage of this cool stuff.

At this point if you are the little guy you can stop reading and go buy more of this stuff. If you are the big guy read on and I will offer some advice on how you can protect yourself.

Blasphemy you may think. How can he make such a crazy statement? Isn’t Google trading at $500+ bucks?

A journalist recently asked me what I though was a brilliant question to ask in an interview “What gets written about all the time in your space that makes you cringe every time you read it” took me a split second to answer.

I can’t stand the one-size-fits-all online marketing strategy idea. You know what I’m talking about; “Spend as much as you can on search, display ads don’t work as well, and test into everything else.” Sound familiar? “Oh by the way don’t forget to buy yourself and island on second life” at this point I puke.

Let me play out a scenario for you in hopes I can make my point. I’m going to use Banking as a point of reference as an example because I know the business well, but if you work for a bank don’t get too exited, put your pen down I wont use any real numbers, or divulge anything you can use to benchmark. The name of this fictional bank is “Purple Bank” consider it a household name.

Lets take a new checking account for example, it generates $150 in revenue every year, therefore we decide we are willing to spend up to $50 in marketing to acquire each new customer. Again these are NOT real numbers.

We refer to that $50 as our target CPA (Cost per acquisition). After reading every book, article, blog, and napkin about online marketing we decide to test paid search first.

We take those $10,000 we begged and pleaded for and decide to buy a few carefully chosen brand related keywords like “Purple Bank”, “Purple Checking”, or “Purple Account”.

Results come in and….drum roll. We are heroes 200 accounts at a CPA of $25 bucks. The boss is pleased, pats us on the backs and says “get me more. How much money do you want”. At this time he also coaches you on the fact “the brass does not really get too excited about a few accounts, They want volume. BTW we don’t get extra credit for coming in under $50, they want scale”.

These days I get asked at least a half dozen times per week questions about emerging media opportunities. Most folks want a straight answer on what should they care about, and what should they ignore. I’d like to share my mental filter for evaluating every new media opportunity.

I look for these two attributes; “Media Value”, and “Engagement Value”

Media Value is a fairly straightforward concept, simply evaluate what it cost you to reach your specific target audience at scale compared to all other media channels. A recent example would be MySpace. I got this question a lot. Frankly if you are trying to reach that younger audience it is a great buying opportunity given the fact so many advertisers cant get their heads (AKA legal department) over the idea of placing ads anywhere near user generated content. You can simply reach many more of your target for less. Don’t be a wimp, and get in there while it’s still a bargain. On the flip side if reach is what your looking for Second Life has like 5,000 active users at any given time of which no one is likely to fly near your freaking island. Second life is not media this is an experiment. Brace yourself… TV (actually what I mean is national cable) can be a buying opportunity as well. This coming from an online guy.

This will be the first of a long list of post dedicated to discussing how we should redesign the traditional marketing department. It’s no secret that CMO’s are dropping like flies from many organizations, frankly because the old proven tactics are just simply not as effective anymore. Companies are crying for new blood in marketing, but it’s right under their noses. Management says “we need more accountability for our marketing dollars, we need to embrace more robust analytics, we need to be more nimble, and we need to relate to the new consumer”.

Consider this, not so long ago the interactive group was not so popular. They have had to fight for every dollar, they have embraced technology, and have been doing a lot more with less. They have grown past “telling and selling” and have learned how to have “marketing conversations” with your customers. We all know message integration is key, and every one in your marketing department should leverage these new channels. Putting an old school marketer in charge of interactive is like giving a toddler the keys to your car either useless or dangerous, while giving a great email marketer direct mail is child’s play. Consider where your next CMO should come from.

File this under “I couldn’t make it up if I tried.”

I sat in on a panel today with so called top marketers in the financial services space who kept referring to banner ads, search etc. as “new media.”

I guess they didn’t get the memo in 1999.

All three CMOs acknowledged they clearly understand how their customers consume media today. They even rattled off all the relevant stats to the crowd. Then someone asked if they had actually changed their marketing spend to match media consumption.

The answer: no. They admitted that they still feel a bit more comfortable with media like TV since it’s still hard to prove out the ROI on “New Media.” Wish I had asked them to explain exactly how they know old media works.

The talk of new media is a tell tale sign someone has no clue about the world we live in and market to. Media is media. It evolves as consumer behavior and media consumption evolve. There has been neither an official date set nor official line drawn that denotes new vs. old. In fact TV, radio, print, search, online ads, and even out of home media have changed and will continue to evolve.

Based on this panel experience I predict a couple of new CMO gigs will soon be open at some major US banks.

I’m a big fan of using personas to influence experience design – to a point.

Personas have become a religion for some folks, the most dominant and often the singular driver for making design choices.

My rub is not with personas themselves, my rub is with people that use personas as the only influence to drive their designs. Information architects and UE designers have become experts at deciding what content should get what share of voice based on who MAY be coming to your web site..

The fact is that technology has evolved quite a bit since the persona driven design methodologies were first introduced. Which means information architects don’t need to guess who is on your site. They know who is coming. Which changes the persona game.

To ignore the real customer needs in favor of their made up persona is silliness. It’s like ignoring what the GPS tells you because you paid so much for that compass.

Did I say silliness?