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Yeah yeah, I know – the only reason you kept reading, is because you’re into leads and demand gen. I’ll get back to marketing porn in a moment. Is there really a difference between lead generation and demand generation? Our friends at Marketo put it well: “Demand generation is the evolution of traditional lead generation. Unlike traditional programs that throw any lead over the wall to sales, it is about qualifying and prioritizing prospects, nurturing a steady crop of qualified leads that want to engage with sales, aligning marketing with sales, and measuring and optimizing the results over time.” That’s kind of true, but it’s a little simplistic. Large enterprise hardly ‘throws any lead’ over the wall to sales – the qualification process (often telesales) was in place way before the term ‘demand generation’ was even coined.

There’s no doubt that B2B marketers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in sustaining an ongoing dialogue with their prospects to improve the quality of the lead and ultimately increase conversion ratios – thus, demand gen rules. Now if you follow that logic through…as ‘bare bones’ lead gen (e.g. white papers, cpc, webinars) gets commoditized and marketers apply price pressure to vendors, will their budgets increasingly flow into data warehousing, data mining and marketing automation? Will marketers want to bring the entire nurturing cycle in-house by generating cheap leads and scoring and intensifying each ‘dialogue’, thus providing their sales organization with optimal inbound demand? Or will they want to outsource and be handed ‘the perfect lead’ at a much higher CPL?

Knowing the time and resource constraints of the 10,000+ marketers I have spoken to over the past 12 years, I would hazard a guess that what they would really like is control of the ‘demand generation’ cycle without the headaches of en masse data handling and interoperability. Here is – in my humble opinion – what needs to happen for this to become a reality over the next 5+ years (and yes, it WILL take that long):

1. ‘Marketing Automation’ will need to grow up and become a turnkey data warehousing/data mining/marketing automation environment and provide the technology and associated services to adapt to individual needs more intelligently. There will need to be a universal industry standard, developed by marketers and the various vendors in the field.

2. ANYONE who sells leads (online or offline) will need to use related technologies which will seamlessly integrate with this universal industry standard for data transfer and scoring purposes. This, in turn, will provide an opportunity for these vendors to play a more significant role in extending their services to nurture leads without the ‘scoring disconnect’ which is so frustratingly prevalent today.

3. Any company must measure its demand gen marketers ENTIRELY by pipeline or business closed, all whilst rewarding creativity and commercial smarts.

4. Once these steps have been accomplished, lead generation will be FREE and marketers will hold vendors accountable based on conversion to opportunity or even conversion to sale – which will of course become the new points of transaction. And yes, they WILL enjoy watching vendors fall over themselves to make sure THEIR ‘nurturing’ programs lead to the highest conversion ratios. Sound good? Since we need a soundbite to go with the times, let’s call that TRUPEBAMA (“true performance based marketing”). Needless to say, TRUPEBAMA is marketing porn.

I love Google, have done for a long time. But our relationship has been strained lately. Things haven’t been the same and I simply can no longer pretend that everything is OK. I’m done with sheepishly hanging on its every word, just because it looks at me with its tantalizing and seductive red and yellow o’s. Google has just launched ‘Campaign Insights’ which promises better measurement of display advertising. At the moment, you can measure how many clicks your display ads achieve, measure conversions that result from those clicks, compare results with “industry benchmark data” (brought to you courtesy of DoubleClick…which is owned by errr Google), and use “view-through conversion reporting” to measure visits to your website from users who viewed your display ad in the past.  The tool compares a base of thousands of web users who viewed an ad with a proportionate group of users who did not and then measures any difference in searches and Web site visits directly attributable to the ad. This approach differs from most display ad assessment tools that typically compare Web site visits or click-through trends following a display ad campaign.

According to Austin Rachlin from the Inside Adwords crew, three simple principles guide their approach: simplify the system for buying and selling display ads; deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure and open up the ecosystem by making it accessible to more participants.  Ironically, ‘openness’ is precisely what is lacking in Google’s uncomfortably extending monopolization of display, mobile , search and social. Yet again, we’re supposed to trust the objectivity of Google’s algorithms and business models, both of which are a complete black box. In speaking to a number of (ethical) advertisers, I have detected a sense of unease about the lack of transparency provided by Google around its practices for gathering and interpreting user data. The more Google launches intelligent tools for its advertisers and the more behavioral data it shapes into uncomfortably intelligent profiling, the more Google risks compromising its integrity. For the sake of our everlasting love (and mankind’s trust in the web), I hope that Google will prioritize the interests of its users over those of advertisers. Don’t be evil Google.

With Google posting its strongest quarterly profit ever ($1.6b) and tech companies such as IBM following suit, the recovery is well and truly under way. Or is it? It is. Almost. Well…kinda. Not in marketing departments. Yet. I have spoken to a number of senior marketers over the past weeks and not only are they having to fight for money, but they’re being given their shredded budgets in the quarter they’re supposed to execute programs in. Yeah – that’ll help the ROI!!! And, as opportunistic as ever and well ahead of the marketing budget recovery curve, the same old vendors are busy repackaging the same old offers with a nice new ‘post recession’ bow on top. Some more subtle than others. On this occasion (and surprisingly), subtleness was brought to us courtesy of an agency! I know – hard to fathom, but true. Michael Gale from Strategic Oxygen was on form as he shared his vision of the new audience and content centric marketing landscape. I did laugh out loud when I realized that his proposed best practices may require regional/field, product and corporate marketing departments to actually TALK to each other – and align their activities. That was funny. I mean seriously – as if the recession has really changed anyone. Bankers are back on unexplainable bonuses – if THAT hasn’t changed, I very much doubt marketing divisions will start group hugging.

Anyway – what I did take away from his lively presentation were some useful reminders for all of us (supported by good data from thousands of interviews). The right content at the right time in the right place matters. A lot. Sounds blatantly obvious, but it’s not. It’s also not bloody easy when the ‘right place’ can be hundreds of places – this whole 2.0 explosion thing really hasn’t helped marketers with the old targeting challenge. Before you had a handful of communities with 10s or 100s of thousands of targeted professionals – now you have 10s or 100s of communities with your target audiences scattered all over the place. GREAT! Seriously though – how do you figure out where in this new landscape your audience spends their time during the awareness, consideration and purchase phases??? And even once you’ve figured that out – what about age? Appearently, the younger your target audience is, the more they consume. And as a result of that, boomers, cuspers and generation y have completely different content consumption preferences at the various stages of the purchasing life cycle. Oh yeah, and then there is the cultural nuances around various geographies…

Sounds like a lot to do with limited resource right? Wrong. In the same way that 2.0 has turned traditional content consumption rules on their heads, you can turn traditional marketing rules on their heads. This is not about customized content for each medium and individual, adapted by age and geo. It is about realizing and accepting that you’ve officially lost all control. You can’t possibly know who wants what, where and when. Empower your buyers with ALL the assets and THEY will chose WHAT they want, WHEN they want it, WHERE they want it. In my humble opinion, you as the marketer will – in turn – need to be empowered by some seriously fresh 2.0 marketing tools and partners to travel this journey with you. Let’s hope that they will provide YOU with the right content at the right time, in the right place. Peace out.

On November 17, 2009 I will be grilling a prestigious panel of three big name analyst firms, 1 CXO subscriber and 1 senior marketer on this question. Register by hitting the ‘attend’ button below. In a world of community empowerment, media is fighting for survival as its editorial voice struggles to compete with the web’s peer-to-peer conversations. Are analysts bound for a similar destiny?

Are these very communities the future of research, market intelligence and vendor reviews? Picture sophisticated social networks of highly targeted professionals – connected by powerful Web 2.0 tools and platforms – who not only generate content but also share the insights and conduct the research which analysts have become synonymous with. Will analysts be able to compete with the immediacy and fluency of these peer-to-peer conversations? This round table webcast will aim to answer these questions and look at the future role of analysts in this new landscape.

Mingling around at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (a welcome newcomer in the top 10 of the healthcare event calendar according to industry insiders), one can’t help but feel inspired by this new movement that is emerging in the healthcare sector. ‘User generated healthcare’ promises to bring together content and transactions in a user-friendly way. Increased availability of data and today’s 2.0 tools (mobile devices, social networks, widgets, online events etc) provide a significant opportunity to create unprecedented engagement and conversation between patients, clinicians and (the much demonized) insurers and biopharma companies. With patients increasingly demanding to be heard and empowered (rightly so, since we pay for it all!!), 2.0 is precipitating a momentous power shift in the healthcare sector. Not only will patients be better educated on diseases and have a say in their own treatments or doctors, but they will be able to take charge of their own ‘preventative medicine’ journey and diagnose themselves using mobile and web applications and technologies. This will change the patient/healthcare provider/insurer/supplier landscape and one can only hope that ‘the system’ will put its weight behind this momentum and not stifle it as it has so often done in the past.

Speaking of which, the FDA is holding public hearings on social-media use – they’re being as open-minded as they’re heavy-handed when it comes to enforcing regulations under the new administration. The question on everyone’s mind is how you create the traditional delineations in this new (uncontrollable) conversational landscape. What are the liability considerations and what is fair play, what isn’t…my question is how this Health 2.0 movement will change the marketing landscape in pharma. I’m having some very interesting conversations with leading marketers in the world’s largest biopharmas, insurers as well as doctors and patients and will definitely be putting together a round table grilling on the subject. Stay tuned.