Everything You Wanted to Know About Customers

The purpose of marketing has always been clear—to facilitate customer acquisition—but one of the most important things that a marketer can do is help his or her company learn more about its customers.  Who are they?  What do they read?  What do they search for?  What do they shop for?  And what’s the maximum we’re willing to pay to acquire their business?  There was a time when very little of this was really knowable. 

Now, much more of this data is available.  The next generation of media buying will allow advertisers to bid on acquiring customers based on the answers to all these questions, plus one more crucial question.  Who is my customer friends with?

Skeptics in the marketing world probably wonder why it matters who my customers’ friends are, as long as I know what my customers read and search for?  The simple answer is the old cliché, birds of a feather flock together.  Most of my friends have many things in common with me.  We’re at a similar stage in life, with a similar income and more or less the same professional status.  If I own a mobile email device, it’s highly likely that many of my friends own one too.  So if I search for a new device, read a product review, or otherwise announce to the advertising world that I’m in the market for a mobile email device, chances are that many of my friends are or will be in the market for one as well.

The same is true of anything else I’m shopping for online.  If I shop for an Ohio State University sweatshirt, many of my friends would probably also be interested in paraphernalia from that highly venerable institution, since many of my friends went to the same school.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the likely candidate to lead us into the next generation of data-driven media buying is neither Google nor Microsoft.  It’s their much maligned, often ignored, underdog rival Yahoo!  With its two recent acquisitions of BlueLithium and RightMedia, Yahoo! has brought on board highly targeted ads and dynamic, auction-based pricing, two key components of this next generation.  With the development of SmartAds technology, Yahoo! has taken a step towards dynamic creative generation to tailor individual messages to individual users. To really rule this space, however, Yahoo! needs to combine all these with socially targeted media.

I’m not saying Yahoo should up and buy FaceBook, or give 25% of its own company (roughly $7.1 billion) for MySpace, as