excerpt from a post by a BlueKai exec:  “The usage of data will penetrate the online ad ecosystem and the next few years should see data impacting the entire media buying process – end to end. Marketers already need to understand their audiences through customer interactions across multiple channels. The most progressive marketers are maximizing both audience and campaign performance data as a way to drive marketing spend…as more and more agencies adopt media strategies that deploy audience profiling and data analysis, there will be an increase in demand for the data scientist…Data driven audience targeting moves operation out of the back room black box systems and into the hands of marketers who are planning so they can really do a much better job of identifying your ideal customer, reach them by very specific targeting attributes and get a much better picture of what’s working and what’s not. It seems like a no-brainer, but much of the online media spend today is not driven by data. A data-centric approach to marketing is opening up a new world to online marketing which promises to be a world that provides transparency, target specificity, scale, accountability and results…The ability to combine audience and media performance data gives marketers a full picture of how they can get more of their marketing dollars. 2011 promises to be the year marketers take control of their data and look for solutions that can provide a full-service, full-loop solution will become vendors of choice.”
