NP: Genesis, Extras 1976-1982

I'm starting to lose track of all the systems that are being developed to measure multi-channel online marketing. The latest one in the news is from recent Chicago transplant Dotomi, who adds some behavioral targeting (and retargeting, if my memory serves) as their special sauce.

This is all good news, and all important news, because search needs very badly to break out of what Gord Hotchkiss describes as a sort of organizational bubble:

Search marketing lives as an isolated island within most organizations. It lives apart from the main marketing department -- as well as the day-to-day pulse of the corporation. The bigger the company, the more true this is. That means that the one department that has a hope in hell of understanding the importance of all these collected searches has little or no voice in the overall marketing strategy. All those signals of customer intent -- indeed, the best barometer of consumer sentiment ever built -- lies locked away behind the imaginary door of the search marketing cubicle. The traditional marketing folks have no idea that this crystal ball, offering a real-time view of the goals, thoughts and aspirations of their target market, even exists, let alone how to use it.

A lot of this strikes me as evolutionary. Search tools do search, and have tended to get specialized before they get integrated. This is still a young industry. As the tools get better at enabling wider views of the landscape, and as people actually start using them, this may start to change. I've seen Compete, comScore and Google all make efforts in this arena of proper multi-channel analysis, and I'm hoping to get some hard data on how this message is resonating with marketers when I get to work on a large search marketing report that I'm not sure if I'm at liberty to talk about.