While targeting an online audience using disparate data sources has been de rigueur for many years, (I was working on this almost 7 years ago to the day at AC Nielsen.) there is a movement afoot to bringing more tight advertising targeting options to TV.

This WSJ article on bringing targeted advertising to TV has some choice quotes.

“Most of the work that has been in online advertising over the past 20 years has really been preparation for the big screen,” he says, referring to TV. “That’s where the money is.” Dave Morgan Simulmedia.

Seeing the still small online budgets out there, makes me tend to agree in broad strokes with Mr. Morgan’s comment above. The online advertising audience is ever growing, but the granularity of audience that can be bought tends to make specific audiences smaller. Big brands still crave the real reach that TV offers.

Ms. Tracey Scheppach of Publicis, “Adapt quickly, or go the way of other media whose business has been eaten by the Internet, like newspapers. “We have to shape our future before it shapes us,” she said, predicting that, within six years, technology could be in place to allow all TV ads to be targeted.

“This could be marketing nirvana, or fraught with potential peril,” says Tim Hanlon, chief executive of Velociter, the investment arm of Mediabrands, a unit of Interpublic Group.

To Mr. Hanlon’s point, there is additional regulations in place with data use as it applies to TV. I think that to skirt regulations and to make use of targeting options that are self regulated, that targeting methods may be one of the reasons that we will see more online (internet) and offline (TV) convergence.

“Andrea Thomas, senior VP-sustainability for Walmart, the flagship U.S. retailer of the Walmart Stores, which also includes Sam’s Clubs and numerous chains overseas, said it’s really consumers setting the agenda, not the retailer. “Our customer is becoming much more articulate about needs in this space,” she said. “The best way to do it is to work together as an industry.”

This is one way that self regulation could work, as the 800 pound gorilla can make demands and push directives that if suppliers want shelf space, then they need to play by the rules.

On the surface that seems tough, but then again, with Government regulation and related politics, this method could drive much quicker results.

My jaw dropped in horror. Below please find the comments. I have removed the identities of commenters, since I pulled a copy and paste without permission.

• But a great product with great service assures loyal customers 1 day ago
• Sounds like AT&T + Apple. 1 day ago
• My take is that, from startup budget perspective, great product is relatively easier goal than great service. To that end, adding product features that reduce needs for service and support is top priority IMO. 23 hours ago
• 1% of your customer base can take 200% of your profits away through tech support costs if they just don’t understand what to do and they keep your tech reps on the phone too long or by repeated calls. Ease to use interfaces and simplified documentation help reduce that amount. And most importantly, Quality is best known by its abesence, so don’t under-resource Quality Assurance because it is actually part of the product and not just a cost center.

I can’t believe that this is even debatable at this juncture. I have worked with at least two firms that had great service and a great product. Sales and customer retention hummed. After acquisitions occurred, Account Management and related services took a back seat to other initiatives dictated by the acquiring companies. Guess what, word got around that service was suffering, competitors grabbed clients at the end of their contracts and also made it difficult in the pre sales and sales process as well.

Having exemplary service is a given. Zappos is always held up as the gold standard in the area. They definitely don’t compete on price, they are able to charge more due in large fact to their service and return policy.

Netflix is a firm that I would like to add to the gold standard category. My wife and I decided to subscribe over the Holidays, based on both the convenience as well as the low price. I figured that there would be little service at the $9.00 per month price point.

Yesterday, I received the Netflix mailer shown above. There was only the torn front flap, not the rest of the envelope (or the Social Network DVD!)

A simple email was sent to NF to which they replied to the effect of “So Sorry, sometimes things get lost in the mail.” A replacement DVD is in the mail.

No blame game, no penalties- just service and another happy customer spreading the good vibes.

I am not saying that the customer is always right, but don’t be short sighted about service, as a competitor can spring up and capture your customer base. In this case Amazon Prime…

After I logged into FB today after a many months absence, I received the following message:

While I appreciate the friendly email reminders, I was actually running an informal test. I wanted to see how much I would miss Facebook. To be honest, FB was always more of a fun activity for me, but I have been busy with work, travel and real life, so I really didn’t miss it that much.

(I have been using LinkedIn much more in the past year. I definitely feel that the benefits of LinkedIn far outweigh any effort required to make it useful- adding contacts, sending LinkedIn requests, etc.)

The fact that I got the “Welcome Back” email almost instantaneously says volumes about how Facebook is managing their site. As I discussed with @dpbtwo earlier today, the most interesting thing about Facebook is the data that they are collecting. As they add features and functionality to their platform, FB is becoming even more powerful.

I am starting to believe some of the hype out there regarding FB being a larger threat to Google. It will be very interesting to see how FB effects some of the other apps out there- like LBS, mobile, etc.

The title of this book is a bit over the top, but I feel its’ point is pretty right on. Things have changed drastically for people due to the past ten years of Google. Personally, if I can’t remember something specific in a discussion with a colleague, I jump to the GOOG for the answer.

This book explores the lifespan of Google from the beginning, and breaks the time line into chapters that roughly follow years.

One of the main points that Auletta makes is that Page and Brin want to solve all issues by consulting the data. This has been obviously extremely successful for them overall. This has also lead to some serious issues as they have morphed into a self proclaimed media company. Some areas here would be the miscalculation of publisher response to Google Books and the more recent failure of Google Wave.

As Google makes its’ way to the ranks of a large company, the book makes it clear that they want to avoid becoming the next Microsoft- becoming much less nimble and tangled in bureaucracy. Senior executive exits like Tim Armstrong and Sheryl Sandberg could also be a sign that things are moving in that direction.

There were some areas that made it seem as if Googled was written by an industry outsider-while I think that is good on some level, this certainly does not come across as a Google love letter- it does make a case for a strong editor. An example here would be referring to DoubleClick as an agency. There were also a number of typos and number inaccuracies.

Overall, I found this to be a great way to get up to speed with Google as a force. Many of the historical references, I had already heard or remembered, but this book does a wonderful job of assembling all of this into a single place.

Jeron Lanier is a person most associated with Virtual Reality going way back to Palo Alto in the 1980s.

I read this book on a recommendation from a friend, but as we started to speak about the book, I recalled that Mr. Lanier was featured in Wired many moons ago, when I was starting out online.

The book is a quick read, but the subject matter is deep, so I found myself on the train, pausing to absorb what I had just read while pondering implications. I think that Gadget really fills that need, reading it triggered a need for thought an introspection that Lanier’s commentary suggested may be moving away from mainstream thought with the constant twitterfeed and status update culture that is quickly moving to the fore.

One of the concepts that he writes about is the concept of having friends. He says that society is conforming friendship to that of a templated software program instead of the other way around. Web 2.0 “promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically is more for machines than people.”

By that I took to mean that people are rearranging how they think about relationships based on their familiar online haunts like Facebook. There are a certain number of options for relationship status for example and that forces people to make a canned choice.

Because of the adoption of Web 2.0 principles, Lanier says that the web is a more boring place as much discourse, blogs, discussion boards, etc all have a similar layout and feel, the revolution is no longer revolutionary.

I thought the below quote was interesting coming from a senior technologist. It is the opposite of what your immediate reaction would be.

“Software development doesn’t necessarily speed up in sync with improvements in hardware. It often instead slows down as computers get bigger and because there are more opportunities for errors in bigger programs. Development becomes slower and more conservative when there is more at stake, and that is what is happening.”

I could see this in Apple’s old software. It was getting too rigged together, so that they had to find a way to start over. This necessitated the switch to OSX. At first people really bitched about it but after time APPL was proven right. Windows on the other hand, I think is still suffering from this problem. The machines may be fine, but the software is extremely buggy, perhaps to support some of the legacy code. (NB, I used to work @ MSFT and I have not used Windows 7).

“For instance, the user interface to search engines is still based on the command line interface, with which the user must construct logical phrases using symbols such as dashes and quotes. That’s how personal computers used to be, but it took less than a decade to get from Apple II to the Macintosh. By contrast, it’s been well over a decade since network-based search services appeared, and they are still trapped in the command line era. At this rate, by 2020, we can expect software development to have slowed to a near stasis, like a clock approaching a black hole.”

Wow, I hope the future for tech advancement is not as bleak as described above, but I can see his point.

This is an excellent book to get your brain firing. As I stated above, there are plenty of times that you read a paragraph and then need a minute to absorb it all. From my perspective this is a great recommendation for a reason to read this book.

I received this book from the author at SXSW at the Powered Party that was celebrating both the sale of Jaffe’s company, Crayon as well as the release of Flip The Funnel.

Overall, I found this book to be a pretty good read. I think that Jaffe would admit that he is much more in the strategy or idea realm than in the operational area, so parts of this work are a bit high level.

That said, Jaffe makes a solid point that:

“What is the real role of Social Media? Is it possible to grow the business from the inside out? What happens when customer evangelists become effective salespeople? Is it possible to incentivize existing customers to spread the good word about you, your company, and your goods and services without muddying the waters in the process?”

Personally, I agree that once an entity becomes a paying customer, they should not be allowed to leave and become part of a churn statistic. I could give many examples in my career where the sales methodology required a focus on new business at all costs. Once the customers signed the contract, they were treated as a commodity and basically joined a queue to exit the customer base.

Jaffe makes the point that growing business by a focus on your existing customers, you will grow your business with a lower cost per sale. As stated before, Joseph is more of an idea man, so I felt some of the data presented was not as granular as it could be. Granted, he is preaching to the choir, here, but to get a receptive audience among the non believers in the corporate world, there may need to be some more data.

The entire concept of making customer care and related services as a profit center as opposed to the more typical cost center to be outsourced, I think will be a difficult pill to swallow for the corporate world.  I am looking forward to see where this goes.

“eMarketer predicts online advertisers in the US will spend more than $1.1 billion on behaviorally targeted advertising in 2010, rising to $2.6 billion in 2014.”

I have worked around various areas of BT for over 6 years. It is rather amazing to see how the growth is estimated to continue.

BT is made possible by the loads of online data that is collected via surfing sessions conducted by online travelers. The rub is here that not very many people realize that 1. their data is being collected and 2. that this data will be used to profile them and then target them in the future.

“Audience discomfort around marketers collecting data has led to calls for regulation, and some brands are staying on the sidelines of behavioral targeting because they fear consumer backlash,”

“When the online audience is so ignorant of current data protections, it is little wonder that they also misunderstand exactly what online ad targeting is, how it may not really be a threat and what benefits they derive from Websites supported by advertising.”

The funny thing is that the more targeting that is done, and how soon the diminishing returns show themselves. What I mean is that even though Technology allow for the hyper targeting of audiences, the reality is that this hyper targeting can be scaled to satisfy large advertisers.

Other than the folks that sell media or technology related to media, does anyone really want more advertising? It seems that in all channels, people (not consumers nor users) are going out of their way to avoid ads.

The proliferation of choice with over 100 channels on most cable systems and the built in DVRs (and Beta and VHS before them) have always made it possible to avoid TV ads.

Online there is a number of ways to avoid excessive advertising- which is predominately based on cookie technology. There are plenty of programs out there like Ad Block Plus which allow a surfer to avoid banner advertising. Other people flush their cookies frequently and this wreaks differing levels of havoc upon web publishers that depend on banner advertising for their revenue. Despite this click throughs (CTRs- the dominant metric) are at a statistical zero, so even when people see ads they are not clicking on them.

Government is starting to make online privacy a political issue and even though it is pretty well documented that political types are not very internet savvy, things are starting to happen.There has been a period of self-governing followed by some IAB PAC sponsored old fashioned D.C. lobbying. Conversations that I have been a part of feel that there will be some sort on government-mandated regulation in the next year or so.

This NYTimes article discusses how the Future of Privacy Forum developed a logo to let people know how they received the particular ad- behaviorally targeted, contextually targeted etc. They came up with the blue logo above. Does anyone think that will address privacy concerns and make people feel better about targeted advertising (and the underlying technology?)

It comes down to, do people want more advertising?

This post originally appeared here.