Last week marked the sixth anniversary of TNS Media and Compete’s Digital CMO Summit and, despite the economic gloominess, attendees’ outlook for digital marketing was quite bright. One hundred and fifty senior executives from top brands, agencies and media companies gathered in Newport, R.I. for two and a half days of presentations, knowledge-sharing and extensive networking. The event spawned new ideas about the future of marketing, some forward-looking and many instantly actionable. So, in the spirit of sharing, here are my top five takeaways from the event:

1. There’s a new frontier where neuroscience meets online media. (Julie Anixter, Buyology Inc.)

A new class of research, led by marketing guru Martin Linstrom, uses brain imaging to show that what consumers think is equally important to what they say and do. Unfortunately, classic research techniques rely on self-reported behaviors via surveys, when in fact, most consumer decision-making is non-conscious. By linking research on non-conscious behavior to buying behavior, advertisers can get better insights into their audiences and what programs and messaging stimulates their thinking.

2. Base decisions on data, but don’t substitute data for knowledge. (Brian Lesser, 24/7 Real Media)

With new audience measurement and Web analytics data, marketers have never had so much information at their disposal. However, data can easily lead to a state of information paralysis. To combat this, make sure your analytics tools are focused on generating actionable consumer onsight, instead of just creating more reports. Train all levels of the organization to look for small insights first, then develop hypotheses and take an iterative approach to optimization.

3. Better creative will help online get beyond direct-response thinking. (Randy Rothenberg, IAB)

Anyone who thinks that the future of online media rests on click-through rates is a nincompoop. The beauty of internet advertising is that it is more measurable compared to other media. But that’s also its curse; in their zeal to prove ROI, many advertisers, agencies and publishers have reduced advertising effectiveness to a spreadsheet — and are designing campaigns to achieve narrow and shortsighted numeric goals. This reinforces the myth that the Web is best used as a direct-response and not a branding medium. Great creative will pave the way for a more holistic view of the Web.

Want to see what the last two takeaways from this notable event were? Check out Compete’s monthly post on MediaPost. And be sure to check out the Digital 180 channel to watch interviews with Summit attendees as they share their insights.

“Yes, I have tweeted.” If you’re a fan of Stephen Colbert, you’ll know that his boastful response to Meredith Viera earlier this month wasn’t phrased exactly that way, but it’s clear that America is tweeting along with him.

So, how many people are using Twitter? According to Compete data, 14 million people visited twitter.com in March, a 76% increase from February and a whopping 14 times more than March last year. And this doesn’t count the twitterati who rely on software apps like TweetDeck or Seesmic. The site already attracts more people than Ticketmaster, WSJ and LinkedIn, and the term “Twitter” had more queries than “American idol” and “IRS” across the top search engines last month. Like its social media predecessors, Twitter has captured the attention of consumers — and marketers have to play catch-up once again.

Given this explosive growth, is there any doubt that brands will try to tap Twitter as a marketing tool? But therein lays the challenge: marketers haven’t encountered anything like Twitter before. Despite its large user base, the underlying mechanics of Twitter are really about being atomically small. As a marketer, how can you hope to drive sales or create a branded experience when you’re faced with a 140-character limit and a massively fragmented audience? How do you attract a following? How does it influence your other marketing programs? And how do you know if your efforts are creating ROI?

If you’ve read my other submissions to Metrics Insider on Moneyball Marketing, you’ll know that I am a big fan of marketing that starts with a specific outcome, and then employs creative tactics and new metrics to measure progress and iterate along the way. And in this sense, Twitter is a great tool. While many people are content with Twitter’s soft ROI impact (like seeding and/or listening to conversations about your brand), we are starting to see examples of Twitter’s hard ROI impact, too. Southwest Airlines and JetBlue are tweeting promotional offers to followers, and Dell is probably the first company to achieve $1 million in sales exclusively through Twitter. And you can be sure these brands are taking what they learn from these campaigns and informing the rest of their marketing.

My personal favorite example comes from American Express, specifically its OPEN Forum. The OPEN Web site combines professional editorial, consumer-generated content and product marketing. To tap Twitter, American Express co-opted the popularity of its guest bloggers like Seth Godin, John Battelle and, in particular, Guy Kawasaki, ( who wrote about Twitter on the OPEN Forum site just last week).

To see exactly how American Express and OPEN Forum are excelling with their use of Twitter and getting measurable ROI, check out Compete’s monthly post on MediaPost.

In my post last month, I contrasted swing-for-the-fence Powerball Marketers from companies that follow a scientific, Moneyball Marketing discipline. The quick summary is that Powerball Marketing is analogous to gambling, and unfortunately many companies continue to make big bets without investing in data or techniques that could improve their odds. Moneyball Marketers, on the other hand, represent a new breed of analytically driven, outcome-oriented practitioners who use new metrics and game plans to consistently beat their competition. While some readers took issue with my criticism of Denny’s “Free Breakfast for America” campaign as pure Powerball, no one disagreed that changes in technology and consumer behavior make relying on conventional marketing wisdom a career-limiting endeavor. To that end, this post will focus on what companies can do to become Moneyball Marketers.

In his book, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” Michael Lewis describes how a handful of Major League Baseball general managers have succeeded in creating championship-caliber franchises despite substantially smaller budgets and supposedly inferior players. My view is that the approach these managers are taking is directly relevant to what marketing managers need to do. In my assessment, there are three skills that companies need to develop in order to win consistently.

Start with quantifiable outcomes. I continue to be amazed by how many agency personnel think that achieving a large number of impressions is the primary measure of a campaign’s success (a fact I have been exposed to when judging industry awards). In my view impressions, as well as reach and frequency, are a simple input into the marketing equation. Outcomes matter more, and if you can’t quantify them, then they don’t count. What are some good examples of outcomes? How about “grow 10% each quarter” or “increase customer retention five percentage points by the end of the year?” Defining great outcome statements upfront is the critical first step in marketing planning — and when they are quantifiable, they establish clear success criteria for your agency and media partners. Point: Don’t invest resources in a marketing program until the desired outcome is identified and you can connect the dots from program execution through to success.

Use new metrics based on new data. Data can be a blessing and a curse; in the end, the determining factor is knowing what to measure. In baseball, sabermetrics has emerged as the new math, complete with new data and metrics. “Run production” is the number one performance measure, and old school metrics like batting average don’t predict run production as well as innovative new metrics like on-base percentage and range factor. Similarly, conventional marketing metrics like purchase intent (collected via surveys) are no longer adequate when we can use consumers’ actual online shopping behavior to better calculate the brand and sales impact of a particular campaign.

Like sabermetrics, clickstream-based marketing measurement has proven to be a better measure of consumer purchase behavior than the conventional techniques it is now replacing. The best example of this may be in the auto industry, where consumers’ online shopping activities have been translated into a whole new class of demand, conversion and shopper quality metrics like cost per shopper, shopper conversion rate, and reverse cross shop. As a result of these new metrics, auto makers now have a better understanding of how their marketing is performing, and precisely what they need to adjust in order to hit their monthly and annual sales goals. Point: Discard old-school data and metrics in favor of rich, new clickstream-based analytics.

To see what other skill Moneyball Marketers like ING Direct and Hyundai possess, check out Compete’s monthly post on MediaPost.

February marks the slow transition from pro football to Major League Baseball, and while dissecting Superbowl advertising and Theo Epstein’s off-season maneuvers, my thoughts gave way to a new view of marketing in 2009. I’ll characterize it this way, “There are two kinds of marketing executives in the world – Powerball marketers and Moneyball marketers.”

Powerball marketers cross their fingers and hope for great outcomes
Take the Denny’s Free Grand Slam campaign, an effort to drive trial and traffic for the restaurant chain. The number of people who visited dennys.com increased twenty-fold immediately after the Superbowl, but consumer interest since then has receded all the way back to pre-advertising levels.

Can a single Grand Slam be so remarkable that consumers remember to choose it over closer, more familiar alternatives? This seems like a big bet with Powerball odds.

Moneyball marketers start with data and then engineer the outcomes they want
Moneyball is the opposite of Powerball. The basic concept is that the conventional wisdom about creating championship-caliber baseball franchises is patently wrong and that several less familiar statistics can be used to predict success.

Want to see how Hulu has become the moneyball advertiser of early 2009? Check out the first of Compete’s monthly posts on MediaPost.

Whether you’re an analyst, economist or a just a red-blooded American consumer, your eyes are probably fixed right now on the retail industry. We’re all looking for a glimmer of hope that consumer spending during the holidays will survive the credit crunch, sputtering equity markets and corporate downsizing. And now that we’re officially half-way through the holiday retail season, what better time to see how retailers are faring online this year. Specifically, are online retailers ahead of or behind last year’s pace?

For this analysis, we’ll focus on a single metric: daily unique visitors to individual online retailing sites. This helps to isolate the impact of fewer available shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. Clearly, to get a more holistic picture you need to understand additional metrics such as order size and the impact of promotions on margins. Regardless of these two inputs, however, getting shoppers into your online store is a supremely important first step.

The graph above shows total unduplicated daily visitors to a group of ten retailers that Compete monitors as a harbinger for the rest of the retail industry. The blue area represents performance in 2007, and the red overlay charts this year’s performance looking back to November 1. The data show that, as a group, these sites are ahead of last year in terms of driving people to shop their online stores. So the mix of promotional strategies that online retailers are using to lure shoppers in appears to be working.

This market level view is a great proxy for the performance of the industry at large, but yesterday’s post shows that the fate and fortunes of individual retailers can vary widely – even those within the same retail category.

So how is the mother of online retailing, Amazon.com, performing so far this season? The chart above highlights Amazon’s unique visitor traffic and shows that things seem to be going quite well. This chart graphs the accumulated daily shoppers at Amazon, overlaying season-to-date results for this year against 2007 actual performance. Specifically, the chart shows that Amazon is capturing more shoppers this year than it did last year; this is based on increased online shopping among consumers in general, as well as a battery of promotions from the company to spur sales. And the best part of the story for Amazon is that the daily spread is increasing – meaning that Amazon’s performance is actually accelerating compared to the same period last year.

So there might be good news for retailers, the economy, and us consumers after all. If online retail trends continue in a positive direction – and yesterday’s Citigroup note corroborates our positive findings, consumer spending this holiday season may actually be bucking some of the other negative forces in the market. And that would be a great holiday gift…

We’re just 7 days away from the SES NY the next Search Engine Strategies conference. The show runs from March 17-20th in New York City, and what better way to celebrate than to interview Matt McGowan, Vice President of Marketing for Incisive Media’s Interactive division? Matt is spending more and more time taking properties like ClickZ and Search Engine Watch global, so he is rapidly acquiring a great sense for how international brands are thinking about SEM and SEO. Read on to hear how search marketing differs from country to country and what kinds of challenges and opportunities this poses.

If you’re interested in meeting Matt in person, come to SES next week. As further enticement, here is a code you can use to get a discount, courtesy of Compete (20SPKRGUST – 20% off when you register online). Jeremy Crane, our head of search, and I will be speaking at the conference; come by and see us at booth 102.

Share with us the reverse chronological order of your career and how it led you to be one of the key guys at Incisive Media.

I recently gave a run down here that said let me give you a little more detail…

I have been with Incisive Media for about two years now as the VP of Marketing for the Interactive Division, responsible primarily for the 10 year old Interactive News and Search Marketing sites, ClickZ.com and SearchEngineWatch.com and their subsequent event series ClickZ Events and Search Engine Strategies.

Prior to Incisive, I was instrumental in growing the online auction house, PropertyRoom.com, to an Internet Retailer 400 company. As the VP of Sales and Marketing, I ensured that there was always enough product for sale on the site, gathered via a very unique supply chain of Government and Law Enforcement found, lost, stolen and surplus property relationships and more than enough customers bidding on it. Yes, we engaged Search Marketing techniques, in addition to e-mail, public relations and other more traditional vehicles.

Earlier on in my career I worked for Charles Schwab & Co and Pearson Plc and I have a MBA from the University of Oxford.

You’ve got a great vantage point on SEM and SEO globally. What are the big trends you see for the next few years?

With the adoption of Blended Search behind us, there are quite a few trends developing that have yet to fully play out…

1. Blended Search will continue to evolve – the only guarantee is that SERPs will continue to change as the Search Engine’s (SE) learn to include more relevant information on them.
2. Social Media will continue flourish – the majority of web surfers start their online experience at the major Search Engines, that said more and more are heading directly to the MySpace’s and Facebook’s of the world.
3. Mobile Search is a massive opportunity – there are more mobile devices than computers out there. As wireless technologies evolve people may forgo the computer. This is partly what the Cloud Computing phenomenon is all about.
4. Analytics will be key – test, test, test… decision makers will increasingly go to the data to make decisions. The era of the thumb in the air approach to decision making is on its way out.

How would you describe the growth of SES in Europe? How is it evolving?

As expected. The Search Marketing industry is growing at a faster pace in Europe than it is here in the States.

Our SES London Conference and Expo almost doubled in size last year, from about 1,200 delegates to over 2,400. Now in its 9th year, it is now firmly positioned as the premier Search Marketing Conference and Exposition in Europe.

This past January we kicked off our continental European SES Forums, now in their 3rd year, with SES Paris. With 250 people in attendance we have constructed the SES Forum events to be more about intimate learning and networking. Delegates will find each event offers a relatively equal education on Paid Search (known in Europe as SEM) and Organic Search (know as SEO) in their local language, no exposition hall and networking events around sit-down lunches and evening cocktails.

SES Paris received a large amount of local praise and support, both the quality content and the quality of the delegates exceeded expectations, and we are now planning similar forums in Hamburg and Milan for later this year.

Let’s also not forget that we also hold a SES Tokyo forum and we plan to announce addition events in other parts of the world shortly. Stay tuned!

Since SES now operates in multiple countries, what are the ways you engage the local search communities in those respective countries?

Launching a product or service in a foreign country is no easy task and over the last few years we have been operating abroad in Europe and Asia we have adapted our go to market strategy based on our experiences abroad.

One of the most important pieces to the puzzle is finding the right partners – both from a marketing and an editorial point of view.

As the events are localized, they are held in the local language and focus on case studies, strategies and best practices taken from the local market, producing the conference agenda is no easy task. Under the direction of Kevin Ryan, VP and Global Content Director for SES and SEW, we have identified credible thought leaders in each of the markets we are operating in who we can invite to speak and work with to identify new talent.

On the marketing side of the equation, we have identified the local Search Industry trades and associations than can help us spread the word. We reach out to these groups and offer up cross promotional deals to engage them. In addition to the contras, we are also leveraging our Search Engine Marketing expertise to one, launch effective paid campaigns and two, optimize our site for local SEs.

How does each country present its own unique challenges - cultural or otherwise? Any funny stories you can share here?

Each country does present it’s own unique challenges and in order to do business in these markets one must acquire quite a bit of local knowledge – customs, language, industry specifics and alike.

How have you thought about new “social media” tools when marketing SES? How are you making use of newer tools to make London SES more accessible?

All the time… for instance we have launched LinkedIn and Facebook groups, in addition to YouTube and Flickr channels. We are also quite active on Sphinn, an SEM specific forum launched by Danny Sullivan.

Back on home turf, I’ve heard that registrations for SES New York this month are currently tracking double of where it was last year. Apart from stellar marketing, any other particular reasons why?

SES New York is tracking quite well and it will be a great event. Search Marketing is still a very hot topic, one that also is becoming increasingly complex. While title tags, content and links are still very important the most successful marketers are doing much more than that – for instance the integration of Social Media, Mobile Search, Local Search and the more traditional disciplines of TV, Radio and Print.

Over the last couple year’s we have therefore seen increased integration between Search Marketing and the traditional marketing suite, that said there is still a long way to go. Many executive level decision makers, the men and women who make the final decisions on budgets are really just starting to notice the effectiveness of Search Engine Marketing. As this awareness grows so too will the need to educate these high level decision makers and their teams.

Between the increased interest vertically within large multinationals and the increased complexity in getting your pages to rank – more and more people are turning to Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch for Search Marketing education.

What’s your perspective on the evolution of search, with Google having rolled out universal and blended search? How has this changed your approach for online marketing for SES?

Blended Search, or Universal Search as Google calls it, changed everything when it was introduced last year. Basically it has given marketers such as me that opportunity to utilize multiple doorways in our efforts to get listed on the SERPs, especially within those first 10 listings – videos, blogs, images and alike are more relevant today… hence, the YouTube and Flickr channels.

Another adaptation we have made is to treat the blogger community in the search and digital industries in the same manner we treat traditional press (we are the only Conference Series I know of that does this). The press has always been able to access our event, including all the sessions, for free via the press pass, and now the bloggers can too. I do not think a day goes by in which the SES Conference Series and our content sites, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch, are not mentioned on a blog somewhere.

What hasn’t changed? Keyword discovery for one… it is still very important to carefully select the keywords you are optimizing around. E-mail marketing continues to be an extremely effective tool as well, as does select display campaigns and let’s not forget paid search.

As online marketer for an online marketing company, what are your favorite tools that you use to hone your craft? What tools would you like for someone to invent?

This is going to sounds a bit self-promotional, that said, I have been reading ClickZ.com and SearchEngineWatch.com for many years now and I truly don’t not know how any online marketers can effectively execute on their day to day and stay up-to-date on best practices without reading both sites daily.

Who should we get naked with next?

Don Shultz or Seth Godin