Just browsed my iPhone Google Reader news feeds this morning in search for news on the current Laguna Seca MotoGP.

Then this little Dell Ad pops up on my iPhone:

Question is: would I buy a DELL laptop?

Answer: NO WAY! Google wake up…If you want to plaster my news feeds with display ads, please do make it relevant (besides showing the ad in my local language)

Unfortunately I forgot to tab the banner ad to see if Dell actually created a specific iPhone landing page with full BUY now functionalities. More to follow when I see the next ad in my feeds…

UPDATE - July 20th:
Clicked the Dell ad on my iPhone. Unfortunately they did not deliver a great iPhone ready site and experience. The site loaded really slow and offered quite small images and text description. Yes yes I know I can zoom and so on, just hoped to see the first generation Dell iPhone optimized site from ad to check out. But I am sure I can expect to see this in the near future.

We’re delighted to announce that Headlight has had a major upgrade.

This time we’ve focused on 4 different areas:

• Creation of banner-campaigns - which now includes ‘expandable banners’!
• Maintenance and updates
• Google API integration
• General functionality

Without doubt the most anticipated feature is the availability of expandable banners. We’ve strived to make creation of expandable campaigns as easy as possible. Hence, you should feel comfortable in setting up these campaigns from the start.

Another apparent change is that maintenance news is now placed right beside user logon to inform you of future updates.

Furthermore our API has been improved to integrate with Google’s new version 12.

In addition to these major improvements general functionality from media-planning to drill-downs has been updated.

As usual more information is available on our wiki.

We’ve changed Google PPC editing a bit. All changes must now be made in Google AdWords and we will synchronize your campaigns automatically. As always we still need to know if you add new campaigns in AdWords.

After some years in the making, the most dramatic and disturbing period in modern media history is clearly present, yes, actually dominant: The transformation to “the digital”. The consequence will be that the traditional marketing consultant must adapt to a fundamentally different world … or fade away.

“Marketing” has always been a communication discipline that covers many different functions; they typically share a firm anchoring in “the creative”; brainstorms, advertising mascots, pillow fights and fantastic ideas…

“The good idea” will always have an essential role to play in the battle for the attention of the consumers, but it will gradually lose its strategic significance as the dominant factor when a company needs to define its sales and marketing strategy. In an attempt to establish a competitive strategy, the marketing function will to an ever greater degree have to refer to more scientific techniques, rooted in analytical methods and statistical models and a deeper “analyzed” understanding of the target group.

Already back in 2004 Forrester Research introduced the concept “Left Brain Marketing” (similar to what we call “Next Level Marketing“) in an attempt to describe this shift from the creative and artistic towards a more scientific approach to the marketing function.

Two of the most important catalysts for the development towards a more analytical approach to the marketing function are, on the one hand the transformation of the mass media from analogue to digital, and on the other hand the increasing collective demand for “directions” the world over for clear documentation of the effect of both historical, as well as future marketing activities.

The anatomy of the media is changing

The discipline “marketing” has a close, symbiotic relation to the “media” and changes in the media manifest themselves with great consequence for the way marketing is thought out and practiced. If you look closer at which direction the media landscape and the media are moving there are three trends worth noting:

1. The media landscape is getting more and more fragmented

The supply of media and the amount of content has risen explosively in the past 30 years. Competition for the attention of the consumers has become enormous. The number of American television channels, for example, has risen from around 5 channels in 1960 to around 80 channels today according to a study by Forrester Research. Entirely new media such as “wireless” and “broadband internet” have come into existence.

The fragmented media landscape means that the behaviour of the consumers has also become much more dynamic and fragmented than before. The consequence is that there is no longer a “mass” in the mass media. The marketing function has to use quantitative data and analytical techniques in order to target efforts to a much higher degree than earlier in order to get to the target group. Decades of carpet bombing through the traditional mass media is definitively losing its effect.

2. The media become addressable

While the increased fragmentation of the media can seem like a barrier in the attempts to capture the attention of your target group, the possibility of to a much higher degree being able to direct a unique message to the individual will offer entirely new possibilities.

A still relatively primitive example is Google, which today gives you the possibility of directing your message at the individual, either based on “user behaviour” or “the context of the user” (a certain page). And Microsoft and Facebook give you the possibility of yet more targeted placements using data such as sex, age and personal characteristics.

The media becoming digital and addressable also means that the media and marketing activities become measurable. You will very quickly and precisely be able to analyze the effect of a specific investment; compare your result with existing goals and historical data. In other words it will be possible to very simply and very cheaply document what “works” and what “doesn’t work”. Companies who have typically had problems communicating directly with their target group because of their placing in the value chain, with an agent between themselves and the consumers will have unique possibilities of entering into a more varied dialogue with their customers.

3. The media become interactive

A last central change that meets the marketing consultant is “interactivity”. The media becoming more interactive means that companies have the possibility of establishing two-way communication with the consumers, which for example makes it possible to conduct market surveys quickly and at a fraction of the earlier cost. It also makes it possible, to a higher degree, to use a response-oriented strategy in your marketing and target your message directly in situations where a consumer articulates a “here and now” need (impulse buying need).

Marketing – from art to science

From the marketing industry traditionally being dominated by “characteristics” associated with creative qualities, we will in future see a clear shift towards a far more analytically informed approach. The focus will be on the collection and segmentation of customer data and the preparation predictive analysis, which can lead to the decisions that will have a high business value. A marketing consultant will to a much higher degree have to employ a detailed analytical method to precisely indicate the customer group that must be reached, adapt the message to the individual segment to motivate a particular reaction, and deliver precisely the creative message at the exact time where it will create most attention.

In order to solve this task, companies will have to invest more in technological analysis solutions, just as they have to invest in people who understand how to construct models, collect data and make well-documented decisions on the basis of this data.

The traditional advertising agency or the classic creative marketing consultant, who doesn’t know how to acquire these qualifications and develop these tools will have great difficulty maintaining their position as (most) strategically important. The trend is already visible in the large media conglomerates where the “media agencies” are aggressively expanding with large interconnected “business science” divisions and in this way are gaining quickly on their creative sister companies.

This trend only underlines an even more dominant trend; In a world dominated by tendencies like fragmentation, addressability and interactivity, and new media like “broadband internet”, “wireless” and “interactive television” it will not only be agencies rooted in the creative, but equally be companies like “Accenture“, “Acxiom“, “Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu” and “Epsilon“, who will define the marketing strategy for the world’s leading companies.

We are happy to announce that Headlight again has been upgraded. From simple improvements like the availability of Russian Roubles to a whole new reporting-engine this release is centered on exporting and reporting.

A new and very important feature is ‘Scheduled Reports’. From now on it is possible to order individually, customized reports in order to make your marketing even more focused. Just fill out the form under ‘Marketing Performance’ and we will get back to you.

Another big step forward is our new export of data function. Charts and views are now easily exportable to Excel, Word or PowerPoint without encoding. This means that what you see in Headlight is what you get in Excel.

In addition to this we have implemented a new print-feature. On every screen in Headlight you will now find a print button for instant print-outs.

Furthermore, users will experience a significant improvement from log-on to sign-out as a massive effort has been made to address app. 30 areas in general work-flow.

As of April 1st there’s been a change in the terms and conditions towards URL’s in Google AdWords.

Therefore they now actively distinguish between display URL, destination URL and landing page URL.

Because there’s great confusion among our customers here’s what you need to know:
In case you use our integration with Google AdWords you can control the display URL (which is what people see) and the landing page URL (which is where people go).
We on our side control the destionation URL; elsehow we couldn’t track your campaigns.

In these new terms Google state:

For example, the following would be acceptable:

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
Landing page URL: www.google.com

In case I made a campaign in Google AdWords for … say a fantastic on-line marketing platform I could make a text ad with these URL’s in play:

Display URL: www.traceworks.com
Destination URL: http://6d45184a-c7dd-499e-9972-7a65ded85c8b.statcamp.net/ turl/?id=60444e778c47480aa1b777996ae04923
Landing page URL: http://www.traceworks.com/product.htm

Unless I’m greatly mistaken this is not a violation of the terms and conditions of Google AdWords. In case Google gets this wrong, just tell them to contact us - we will gladly sort out the mess!

TraceWorks has passed a milestone by entering the Swedish market. We are happy to announce a new partnership with Compost, a Swedish software company, which will resell our solutions to their customers. Our Danish sales team will also work from Compost’s offices.

The partnership works both ways, as Compost’s star solution, Carma, will be included in our offerings.

Carma makes it possible to track how a recipient of an e-mail and/or SMS responds to the options presented to them: Which links he or she opens, and which actions he or she makes – leading to either sale or contact. In this way, it is possible for the marketing department to keep track of sales and marketing campaigns and to register the preferences of the recipient.

Carma offers the marketer a unique tool for reviewing the effect of e-mail and/or SMS-based communication. With Carma the marketer will learn which initiatives work best in order to increase his or her customer and prospect base.

Needless to say, we expect you to expect much from Carma and our Swedish sales team.

Interested in more information? Call Christoffer Feldt-Sørensen on mobile +45 2888 5071 cfs@traceworks.com or go to www.traceworks.com and www.compost.se.

I’m the QA Manager at TraceWorks, and I have been asked to inform you about the most important improvements and bug fixes in this morning’s Headlight update. I’ve also promised to continue doing so in the future, so be sure to watch this space

But no more small talk… The update includes more than 40 bug fixes, and the highlights are as follows:

- The backup banners are now displayed in Headlight when a Flash banner campaign is edited or created.
- The “Test banner campaign” functionality has been made more user friendly.
- The image preview functionality has been improved to better handle file names containing special characters, etc.
- Goal Charts and KPI charts no longer display data from dates not included in the selected time period.
- Using the “Compare by label” functionality no longer prevents further drilldowns.
- Advanced banner campaigns can now be deleted without errors.
- In the automated e-mail flow, the recognition of links in HTML e-mails has been vastly improved.
- The selected dates are no longer reset when the period selector is reopened after choosing a custom period.
- The label is now always retained correctly when a previously labelled activity is edited at a later time.

When waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to fill out these oversized shoes I have been handed by our two visionary owners, Morten Wulff and Anders Lau, as well as my CEO Christian Dam I feel somewhat like trying to mount a starving Rancor while only wearing a pair of bacon Speedos.

Looks were decieving
It is not that I do not like the challenge; I honestly love it. However it is a task that grows as I entrench myself into the corners of the beast we call online marketing. From miles away it seemed like nothing more than a heavily sedated kitten and I must admit I looked forward to picking it up and petting it gently on its back while it purred predictably with a rewarding look in its eyes.

As the early weeks have soon grown into 1½ months, it has become obvious that the kitten has grown somewhat more threatening and ferocious in the looking glass and thus I have had to adopt a different and more systematized strategy to tame it, let alone pet it.

I love boxes
Categorizing the problems has seemed to work though. I have come to the conclusion that not only do categories help me define a solution to the problem of understanding the beast itself; It also gives me a weapon with which I can use in helping the world taming their own pet Rancor.

I am waking up happy these mornings and seem to get closer every day to a definition of online marketing as a measurable process within an organization. I have defined the categories and subcategories to form the frame of my solution and have made a draft survey to identify and measure precisely which information one of the major category holds and how this impacts the total online marketing organization.

The revolution is at hand
Soon enough I will be riding my Rancor down your busy online highway screaming and waving at you in definance with my Business Intelligence hat in my hand, not entirely unlike Major Kong riding the Atomic Bomb in the end scene of “Dr. Strangelove, or how I learned to stop worrying and start to love the bomb”. At least I hope I will and I will happily tell you all how I did it.

I am sure we will meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

StatoilHydro is now user of Headlight. StatoilHydro are going to use the Headlight system worldwide and they are looking forward to see the results of their campaigns and to have a totally global overview. TraceWorks are welcoming StatoilHydro as a “TraceWorks Member”.