The Idea Blog

An eye-opening article in the current (Walk Softly and Carry a Big Checkbook, February 18, 2008) Fortune by Jessi Hempel lays out some of the progress at least one smart guy is making in quantifying the buy as well as the delivery for his clients’ media investments.

The “guy” is Irwin Gotlieb, the CEO of media buying company GroupM, a division of the WPP Group. And here’s the money quote from the piece:

“Say you want to sell grapefruit,” [Gotlieb] says … To move a lot of citrus in the traditional way, he explains, you’d buy a spot on “Grey’s Anatomy” or run an ad in Vogue, making behavioral assumptions and inferences built on viewer demographics. But in the digital world, ad buyers don’t need to assume anything; they have data to work with. Online marketers track actual behavior, so instead of buying a type of audience, they can buy a click, an inquiry, or even a sale. Every time consumers take such an action, it becomes part of their “clickstream,” which follows them around the web. This information trail gives marketers an increasingly sophisticated idea about each of us, allowing them to craft an ever more tailored online experience.

But why stop there? What the business really needs is a venue with the reach of old media and the data trail of the web. In 2006, GroupM placed, tracked, and measured 200 billion online impressions, and that figure jumped enormously last year, according to the agency. That’s a lot of behavioral data, and it made Gotlieb - who serves as the top field general to WPP Group CEO Martin Sorrell - think how useful it would be to spray that fire hose of information at non-web media. And so whatever you may think it will do to your privacy, our clickstreams are about to follow us to our TVs, enabling marketers to “send a different message to every set-top box,” he says. “If you’ve got three TVs in your home, the teen gets one message, Mom gets a different one, and Dad gets a third.”

This is only good news, even if it’s a couple or more years from being put to work effectively at something less than the international and national levels. Regional, local and B2B advertisers can work the principles, but the data aren’t there yet. But, yes, marketers, get ready to answer to the numbers’ higher powers.

Take the time to read the entire article. It’s a good study of what’s happening now and in the coming months and years.