Once the game plan is set you must select the team that can make it all happen. You have creative folks, the people that create the look and feel of your site, in one end of the conference room and the technology team, the group that brings the creative vision to life, on the other. That’s the team you need to succeed right? Before you answer that question give it some thought.

What about the IT department? Yes, you heard me right, the IT department. The team that sits in the back room and makes sure the Web site is live, gets your Blackberry up and running and removes viruses that have taken your computer prisoner. The IT department represents the blood and guts of an organization and with online campaigns becoming more and more dependent upon technology and placing greater potential strain on the organization’s infrastructure, bringing the IT department into these discussions is essential.

Now that you are scrambling to send out Outlook invites to the IT team, keep in mind that this needs to be a two-way discussion for this relationship to work. Both sides have needs that must be met for the organization to find success. For now, let’s begin with your IT team. Before you introduce the plans for the next marketing program to them, here are a few considerations to think about.

First, don’t develop and staff your own applications without at least discussing it with IT. If the team does so, IT does not have the expertise or the staff to support these applications because they usually are not well-documented. Look around your marketing department right now. If you’ve got database programmers helping to stir the pot, the IT folks are going to tell you flat out that you are crossing the line. The IT department needs to be in on the ground floor of all application development because they, ultimately, are responsible for the maintenance and execution of them.

The second thing IT will tell you is to stop messing around with the network. After all, one wrong step can turn the network on its head and have huge ramifications for the company. There are concerns about a wide range of things including security, bandwidth and most importantly reliability. What is the point of having really cool applications if it crashes your network? Most marketers are unaware of how problematic it can be for a network manager, the person whose job depends upon network performance and uptime, to suddenly be presented with a series of major delays or outages caused by a rogue Web server that they didn’t even know existed. A move such as this can literally bring an entire company to a standstill.

The third issue that is important to your IT team is sticking with packaged solutions whenever possible. Ideally, they will recommend a solution from a vendor who has already built all the interfaces with the software the company runs on its enterprise and has tested them with dozens of other clients. Going this route takes a tremendous amount of work (and time) out of the assessment and development process. In a worst-case scenario, the IT department will tell you to go with a solution that was professionally developed and supported, fully documented and is based on industry standards.

While you are mulling over these guiding principles make sure you take the opportunity to get some IT-related questions ready yourself. After all, success requires execution on all sides. A good starting point is response time. As a marketer, its seems as though every time I ask IT for anything their answer inevitably starts with, “We’ll have to do a scoping study.” This is a major problem because scoping studies can take up to 14 months, the cost for which will be charged back to marketing. The funny thing is that this 14-month wait, which represents a lifetime in the marketing business, is generally the instigating catalyst for why the marketing team builds their own system, the first “no no” highlighted above.

Another item you may want to delve into in detail is cost – specifically cost of these scoping projects. As it stands now, marketing ordinarily flips the bill for the scoping study that lays out how much the project is going to cost and whether or not it is feasible. If the project is given the green light, marketing then has to pay for the overhead often embedded in the IT function. With budgets shrinking in all departments, this meeting is the best opportunity to talk about how both sides can be more efficient in getting to the “go/no-go” point. By discussing the timeline for deliverables during the preparation stages, both sides can reach compromises that streamline this process and help keep projects on track.

The last area you may want to talk to IT about is flexibility. Marketing has become more and more critical to the success of the organization — be it revenue generation, brand development or pricing. Taking this into account, IT needs to begin anticipating the degrees of flexibility that marketing will need and design some adaptability into the foundations of systems architecture.

If you really want your business to have a world-class marketing capability, you have to think of marketing as a primary customer of IT, not a secondary one. Then you have to bring the two sides together. By doing so at the onset of the next project you are taking the first step in that direction.

Creating this same level of emotion in today’s fragmented multi channel, multi device world has become an increasing challenge for many practitioners. Many marketers have forgotten their roots and are now beginning to wonder why they are missing the mark. Here are my two cents.

In the old days, before the advent of the Internet, the formula to striking a chord with your audience was simple: create a compelling brand message and broadcast the hell out of it so that the public was assimilated into your brand. The key to success was based on two fundamentals, writing and art direction. A copywriter once wrote, “Don’t leave home without it” and with the help of the art director, the campaign became an instant smash. Why? Because it created an emotional response that drove a behavior.  Take some time and think about some of the other big slogans of that time. Whether you recall “Have it Your Way,” “Oh What a Feeling” or “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking,” each of these examples was brilliant in its own way and success soon followed. Each was also the product of a collaboration between a team made up of the art director and the copywriter.

This is where the Internet world is missing the bus. Today, everybody is moving at 110 miles per hour to design and produce more visually immersive brand experiences, and technically challenging one-to-one personalized dialogues.  In this environment, the art director runs the show. What is the copywriter doing? The copywriter has been left behind.

With the copywriter being squeezed out, many of their responsibilities are being taken on by the art director who to say the least, is not skilled in this art form. Think of it this way. Giving the art director the keys to copywriting is akin to having a special effects wizard take on the duties of writing a screen play. The end result would be another Pearl Harbor — a movie full of spectacular, visually compelling images and special effects meshed with a weak dialog that is completely incapable of moving the audience. Nobody is claiming that the special effects people are not critical. Like the art director, they are a vital ingredient to success, but we cannot completely abandon the elements that worked in the past in favor of this new breed.

In addition to the extended duties of the art director, another role has been created, the content strategist. The content strategist job is to help define how a brand communicates to each of its audiences, what channels it uses, what it says as well as when it is said. This role of the content strategist is critical in today’s harried, multi-media channel world. However, as with the art director, their addition to the equation should not come at the expense of a great copywriter.

Striking a chord with your target audience is just as important today as it was when Maxwell House told us their coffee was “Good to the Last Drop.” The difference is that the models for success have changed. The role of the art director has evolved dramatically and new positions and skill sets have emerged. These changes were inevitable and essential. The issue is that as each grew, they did so at the expense of the copywriter who has been all but abandoned. The agency of today needs to hold on to some of the key success drivers of the past including the copywriter because the last time I checked, emotion is still the key ingredient for a great brand and nobody can cook-up like a copywriter.

To me this just seems illogical and somewhat surprising. After all, we hold conferences and workshops on the topic of behavioral marketing throughout the year but once the conferences end; we go home and fall back into the same marketing mindset—using the wide open approach with mass media initiatives.

Now where is the logic?

Like I said, behavioral targeting has proven its worth online, empowering marketers to provide customized programs capable of driving superior results. As interactive advertising revenues continue to rise, and they will (IAB recently stated revenues continued to increase in Q1, nearing the $5 billion mark), behavioral targeted advertising will play an increasingly bigger role. In fact, eMarketer says that spending will surpass the $1 billion mark by 2008 and will nearly quadruple to $3.8 billion in 2011, driven by what it calls the “advertisers’ growing enthusiasm for establishing and building brands on portals and other Web sites.”

With this online success an outsider might assume that marketers are running to identify other avenues where this technology can deliver value. One would think that, right? The reality is that a traditional and narrow minded view of behavioral targeting and how it can be deployed has quickly formed over night.

These behavioral targeting traditionalists view it as strictly an online opportunity, which does a true disservice to this technology by discounting the other areas where it can deliver value. The online realm was the ideal medium for this technology to make its debut and for many it will be the only place it gets utilized. However, for others, such as your local bank or car dealership, the Web is only one piece of the overall equation. It is this group that needs to expand beyond this traditional mindset to see the bigger picture.

So what needs to be done to show marketers that this same success can be achieved on the mass market arena? We know having another conference surely is not the answer. The reality is that marketing professionals need to first open their eyes by educating themselves to the big picture. Once they have done that three things must happen:

First: They now need to move from a channel planning approach to a philosophy of planning for one, which encompasses all devices (from the Web, to the ATM machine, to the fliers that get mailed to your house). A successful campaign will deliver communication goals across each, all based on the behavior of the customer

Second: We need to break out of our traditional models of reach and frequency, which no longer apply. Instead, behavioral targeting needs take a “reach and facilitate” approach where we react as marketers when a consumer is requesting content. As a result, we can facilitate a meaningful dialog that results in first choice brand preference, further opt-in communications and sales for clients

Third: Companies will need to implement a complex system by which marketers can track, react and give consumers what they want on demand.

Consider your local bank:

If a consumer consistently visits their local ATM each Friday, withdraws $100 for the weekend and then ops-out of the receipt, the machine should learn this behavior so in time it knows how much the person wants and that they do not want a receipt. By adapting to the customers’ needs and habits the bank will further enhance that person’s loyalty to their business. The bank may in time take this one step further by then offering the customer suggestions combined with coupons for ways to spend that money, be it at a restaurant or a retail store in the consumer’s area. As they learn which coupons the customer uses the most, future interactions may even become more customized.

The possibilities are truly vast and once we have taken these steps and mastered the ability to manage complex behavioral targeting campaigns across several channels a whole new world of behavioral marketing will open up.