Jackie Danicki

If it was possible for eyes to emit noise, mine and Adriana’s would have been groaning when we saw “What’s next for behavioral marketing?” on the list of questions to ponder in Techdirt Greenhouse discussion. For a moment, I felt like I was back in the decidedly Web 1.2 world of London, where concepts like ‘behavioral marketing’ are given a lot more respect than they deserve. “Well, these guys are all smart,” I said to Adriana. “I’m sure they’re not going to go along with the idea that ‘behavioral marketing’ is where it’s at.”

When Olivier Chaine was prepping us for this discussion with his presentation - which struck me as kind of pointless, as we learned nothing about his company or why we should care about what they do - I wrote the following in my notes:

Total transaction-first mentality - warped [From my notes on JP Rangaswami’s talk here: “Forget the Middle Eastern conversational markets of ancient times - as recently as the 18th century, the entire insurance industry was being created over conversations in London tea shops. Technology is just allowing us to bring back what we already had, but somehow (tragically) lost along the way. The conversation used to come first, then the transaction. We’ve moved to a transaction-first mindset, which is why so many of our business dealings are in terms of contractual relationships instead of covenants.”]

“Marketing 2.0″? More like Bullshit 2.0

David Henkel-Wallace (co-founder of Cygnus, amongst other companies) led my discussion group on this topic. Mike Sigal, the CEO of Guidewire Group who I first met in London in 2004 and later visited with in Spain (and back in London), and who was nice enough to entertain (to rave reviews) board members from Latitude for me during SES San Jose last year, was also in the group. Sam Pullara from Accel was there, too, as was a member of Speedinfo’s management team and someone else whose name I didn’t catch.

Mike Sigal would have been a great discussion leader, and in this group he got in the first important distinction of the conversation: Do we care about being influenced, and/or do we care about being tracked? There is a difference, and not a small one. More from my notes:

- Privacy issues (of course)
- Marketers obsessed with measuring what cannot be controlled
- Surfing or shopping? Sometimes I end up buying when I was just surfing (blog posts often lead to purchases for me), nevermind browsing e-commerce sites
- Amazon suggestions (duh)
- ‘Behavioral marketing’ fine if actually providing real value to individuals
- Deliver value and the process is inherently enriched - ‘behavioral marketing’ should be secondary
- David H-W: “Web 2.0 is silos all over again” - data silos - v little sharing of user data between apps
- Individuals do not own or control their own data, still - sadly
- Legal minefield of reputation and recommendation systems - eBay patents
- Yelp - social reviews
- Jackie D says: SEM (search engine marketing) - landing pages - bring people what they want when they are ready to buy (far down buying cycle, higher conversion, delivering great value - ultimate in online ‘behavioral marketing’)
- Point-of-purchase/impulse sales not maximised by online retailers
- Online retailers don’t try hard enough to maximise sales to existing customers compared to effort they put into winning new biz
- “2 for the price of 2″ (Amazon paired purchase suggestions - “Buy this book plus this other book for ‘only’ the same exact price it’d cost you to buy them separately anyway!”)
- David H-W says “people in Ohio” (go Bucks!) are different from people in Silicon Valley and need to be treated differently
- Way too much emphasis on ‘behavioral marketing’ and other marketing while ignoring existing customers and losing them due to shitty service
- David H-W says “Amazon is happy to piss off a certain percentage of customers”
- Jackie D says “Not all customers are equal” - influencers worth many non-influencers - Is Amazon happy to piss off a certain percentage of customers who have active online voices with lots of inbound links from other influencers? If so, they’re stupid.

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