Blog Posts By: Miguel Barrientos

1. The Silent Click: Building Brands Online (Online Publishers Association) -- A new study commissioned by the OPA and comScore suggests that online display advertising is more effective at creating incremental lift than previously thought. According to the press release announcing the study, "For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that:
   • One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
   • Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
   • Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
   • Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites"

1. Control Group Series (Jim Novo) -- Jim explains why marketers should use control groups in their campaigns.
2. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research (Campbell & Stanley) -- The book that any serious campaign designer should consult before launching a new marketing campaign. Defines and explains pre-experimental designs, pretest-posttest control group design, Solomon four-group design, posttest-only control group design, etc.
3. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference (Shadish, Cook, and Campbell) -- In-depth book for hard-core marketers. Will help you understand how to design valid experiments, and how to draw valid conclusions from them.

The most recent O'Reilly Velocity conference included a number of presentations that proved beyond reasonable doubt that web site performance can have a direct impact on a company's bottom line. Steve Souders, conference co-chair, identified some of the best presentations in his most recent post. Open the links below to watch the presentation videos (or slides):

1. Attribution Management (ClearSaleing) -- ClearSaleing has developed a very interesting technology platform focused on helping companies understand the path that customers follow before making a purchase.
2. A Framework For Multicampaign Attribution Measurement (Forrester - $) -- John Lovett presents a framework for quantifying marketing attribution.
3. Call to Action: Let's Define Standards for Online Marketing Attribution (shop.org) -- Anne Ashbey would like to form a group that will develop best practices for online marketing measurement.

1. Making ads more interesting (Google) -- Three months ago Google announced the launch of their version of behavioral targeting. It's called "interest-based advertising". Three important features of Google's approach are: transparency, choice, and control. Don't miss the Google Ads Preferences Manager, which willl show you the interest categories associated with your browser.
2. Behavioral Targeting Legislation Hearings (DMNews) -- The US Congress is holding hearings to evaluate whether behavioral targeting ought to be regulated.
3. Onsite Behavioral Targeting (Amadesa) -- Amadesa's behavioral targeting engine illustrates the current state of the art in online behavioral targeting for anonymous visitors.

1. There is no "P" in loyalty (Bill Hanifin) -- Bill Hanifin stresses the importance of understanding that loyal customers are not necessarily profitable customers. In other words, starting a loyalty program without having an understanding of customer profitability could hurt your bottom line.
2. State of the Loyalty Industry (Michael Hemsey - PDF) -- Key quote: "Loyalty programs are an investment, not a cost center, and they should generate a positive return."
3. Analyzing Customers, Best Buy Decides Not All Are Welcome (WSJ) -- Best Buy found out back in 2004 that many of its most loyal customers were hurting its profits. Understanding the relationship between loyalty and profitability led Best Buy to roll out a controversial "angel-devil" strategy. One can only wonder if a similar strategy could have saved Circuit City.

1. Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools (Gartner) -- A good starting point if you want to become familiar with the main vendors in the data quality space.
2. Surprising Value of Data Profiling (Kimball - PDF) -- Ralph Kimball provides a concise explanation about the value of data profiling, one of the essential components of a data quality initiative.
3. 7 Sources of Poor Data Quality (Melissa DATA) -- William Mcnight identifies seven sources of data quality issues:
   • Entry quality
   • Process quality
   • Identification quality
   • Integration quality
   • Usage quality
   • Aging quality
   • Organizational quality

1. Customer Segmentation Done Right (Alice Dragoon - CIO) -- If customer needs don't align neatly with your segmentation criteria, your customer segmentation initiative could end up becoming an exercise in futility.
2. 4 Challenges in Customer Segmentation (Mohan Sawhney) -- Mohan lists four key issues to consider:
   • Scope of segmentation
   • Inbound versus outbound use of segmentation
   • Refresh cycle and stability of segmentation
   • Segmentation for multiple audiences
3. Best Practices in Customer Segmentation (Julie Schwartz) -- Best practices and recommendations focused on the technology services industry. Brief case studies. Free for ITSMA members.

Tracking campaign performance accurately across multiple channels is one of the holy grails of marketing organizations. The links below illustrate how you can use Google Analytics to measure performance for voice-based campaigns.

Implementing a membership rewards program is challenging both from a business as well as from a technology perspective. The links below should help you think through the issues and obstacles that must be overcome in order to become successful at loyalty marketing.

The Netflix prize has drawn significant attention to the emergent field of collaborative filtering. The links below provide rich details about the challenge and the prize.

Campaign attribution analysis (i.e. figuring out which campaign is responsible for a sale) is one of the most difficult challenges in marketing. The links below should help you in your quest to understand the challenge and figure out an approach.

One of the pillars required to become more effective at marketing is organizational alignment, a state where a company's strategy and culture are compatible and consistent with each other. If your organization is embarking upon a major change initiative, you may find the links below helpful in pursuing organizational alignment:

As search engines become better at returning results based on the current geographical location of their users, companies will need to pay more attention to the quality of their own geo-presence. The three links below should help clarify what I mean:

• eBay's Two Enormous Data Warehouses (DBMS2) -- Data volumes continue to increase. Collecting tens and even hundreds of terabytes is not uncommon. Marketers now have access to more data than ever.
• Vertica Cloud Edition (Vertica) -- What if you could build a multi-terabyte marketing data mart without purchasing any hardware? Vertica's cloud offering opens new possibilities to companies willing to experiment.
• Trends in Data Warehousing for the Second Half of 2008 (Lou Agosta) -- A little bit dated, but still relevant. Expect to hear more about column-oriented databases, data warehouse appliances, and open-source software.

As a user of social media applications I am not particularly interested in receiving unsolicited marketing messages, but it is just a matter of time before tools like Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook become inundated by all types of marketing communications that claim to be non-intrusive, personalized, and highly relevant.

1. New England vs. Silicon Valley (Kevin Hillstrom) -- Key quote: "There may be fundamental differences in the way your customers shop, based solely on geography."
2. The Prediction Lover's Handbook (Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris) -- Definition, use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and prospects for the following techniques:
   

1. What People Want (and How to Predict It) (MIT Sloan Management Review) – Companies now have unprecedented access to data and technology for informed decision making. Can they beat Will Smith’s track record at choosing films that deliver $120 million or more?
2. Behavioral Economics and Marketing (Dan Ariely) - Behavioral economics, which attempts to explain consumer behavior not covered by standard economic theory, may have profound implications for marketing decision makers.
3. In Hard Times, Fear Can Impair Decision-Making (Gregory Berns) – Understanding how people make decisions in an atmosphere of fear may be crucial to figuring out how to market in a tough economic environment.

1. What Will Campaign Management Be Like In 2020? (Elana Anderson) -- Elana speculates about future developments in campaign management. Key trends mentioned include:
   
   • Improvements in response attribution
   • Support of new channels, e.g. SMS
   • Open campaign management, i.e. CM software that integrates easily with all other types of systems in the enterprise
   • Campaign management services moving to the cloud

Multiple times within the past couple of years I have walked into clients who have built marketing data marts that for all practical purposes can be considered failures. Users were unhappy primarily because reports took too long to execute, and because the IT folks could not keep the data mart up to date.