On Demand: This Year's Busy-ness Buzzword - Can You Say "Marketing"?

So it's the last day and I'm preparing in my a.m. war room - a lone table in the corner at one of the On Demand food courts (by the way, can someone save me the Google time and tell me who came up with the name "food court"?).  Boston has been the wonderful walking city it is (only place I can find Wasabi ice cream at J. C Licks on Newbury Street near the Trident Bookstore) and the weather has been kind, if you don't mind a bit of rain and a slap or two of wind.  I used to live here, so that's no big deal to me.  On Demand has been nicely attended - good people traffic - although I don't think it's as well attended by the international community as they hyped. Fudged figures to me but I could be wrong, as my continuous tale of the tape is just an eye view from the aisles.  Presentations and booth conversations have seemingly been dominated by technology and marketing (communications), the latter bridging with existing and new technologies to increase personalization and the relevancy of marketing communications to (monitor, quantify) maximize ROI. The new buzzword is not TransPromo, but seems to be "marketing."  Marketers have been pushing for the limelight and now they seem to have gotten what they've wanted, and now it's their time to step up the game.  This was evident in yesterday's keynotes: "Emerging Technologies and What to Expect in 2008" and "The Changing Marketing Mix: A Marketing Perspective." Top areas where marketers expect to spend in '08 include: email campaign management; CRM; marketing performance measurement; customer intelligence and analytics; search engine marketing; and sales and marketing integration.  With the exception of the last area, it's metrics, metrics, metrics.  Key items: improving your customer db for personalization and using digital, db-driven channels (email, web, contact centers) to get insight into what customers value to be able to execute relevant messaging. But here's a couple of interesting numbers from yesterday's marketing keynote, "...despite interest and increased efforts, 50% of marketers report having fair, poor or little knowledge of customers and 47% rate their companies data integration capabilities as deficient or needing improvement."  Stay tuned in '08 -- to answer the needs of customers, marketers are looking to seize the day (ROI) with new technologies and channels available for the capture of customer info so that they can dialog with "relevance" with individual consumers - creating marketing initiatives that are valued, which will be the way to increase ROI, or what I like to call metrical ROM (return on marketing).  It always was and always will be all about the customer - and two-way (not one- way) messaging, something called dialog, or what we netizens refer to as continuous conversation (relationship building) in a fast and flexible media world, is of max importance.

Richard S. Papale