New Comm Biz

Remember in the post dotcom area of marketing how “creative” was the must have buzz word for all ad shops? Good creative is still important but it looks like marketing is about to be taken over by nerds (I mean that in a good way). There is no shortage of data on the Web. Most of it is useless to companies because it’s all turned into noise.

Helping companies make sense of the data that’s out there and gain real business insights is the next big wave. If you’re a number crunching, 0’s and 1’s kind of person you’re next job may just be in marketing.

There’s a lot happening right now in the data analytics and measurement space. And apparently yesterday was the day to announce a major partnership.

1) Of course last weeks big news was Adobe buying Omniture. My favorite part of this announcement was the reactions it elicited. I ran a Twitter search through Twendz and the top two reactions were “Wow” and “Weird.” This is obviously a huge deal. The main reason people build ads in flash is not just because of the cool interactive possibilities but because you can embed analytics in them. (On a separate not I think this is why Google is finally pushing so hard on display ads).

I think this news must have spurred everyone else that was working on deals to announce what they had planned because this week has already seen a flurry of announcements.

2) Apparently being acquired but Adobe wasn’t enough big deals for Omniture. Less than a week later they announce a major partnership with Comscore.

This relationship between Omniture and ComScore will enable organizations to unify their online and panel-based audience measurement information, providing more consistent and more comprehensive standard metrics. With the combined offering, publishers and advertisers will be able to automate data integration and reconciliation, eliminate the need for publishers to implement time consuming multiple data collection methods and reduce the labor-intensive steps needed to deliver unified audience measurement.

This is a huge deal for advertisers. There is so much data available to online advertisers but the problem is that it lives in so many different places. If Comscore can help not just validate the numbers you’re getting but help streamline the delivery of that into one place (your Omniture analytics dashboard) then marketers jobs just got a lot easier.

3) Facebook has confirmed that they will be partnering to provide add data to Nielsen. The specifics of the detail haven’t been announced yet but are expected today. I imagine this will be the first of many deals we see by Facebook as they look to leverage the fact that they have the largest walled garden in social media.

4) Lastly, while not completely but still mostly related, the NYT has announced that they are looking to develop a Twitter search product to find commentary on specific topics. This makes sense for a few reasons. First- they own About.com so they have some search capabilities. Second- if more and more news is being broken, shared and reported on via Twitter it only makes sense that a news company would want to stay on top of that.

It makes sense that most of these announcements are aimed at advertising. They’re the ones that are hurting the worst. They’re desperate to prove their value, but you better believe that the other marketing disciplines have plenty up their sleeves. This is just the first signs of what’s coming. This is going to be a very active space the rest of this year.

Update: More evidence of the ad industries urgency -WPP’s Sorrell: We Can’t Fire People Fast Enough To Keep Up With The Collapse In Ads

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