I grew up in the seventies and was influenced by the OPEC oil embargo, and the resulting gas shortages.  I was even motivated to go to engineering school to help solve the energy crisis with renewable energy sources such as solar power. While I eventually graduated with an electrical and computer engineering degree, my education and life experience gave me awareness of the importance of sustainable lifestyles and choices. That is why my favorite session at last week’s IPA Technical Conference was “Green with Envy: How to Win Customers and $ave the Planet” presented by Don Carli.

Next week I’ll be in Chicago talking about automated cross-media marketing at the IPA Technical Conference. It’s a topic I get excited about because I know how it can impact marketing budgets. Once campaigns are designed and tested, repeating them costs much less.

I know that I am aging myself a bit with that reference to the 1983 hit song by the band Styx. But what does Mr. Roboto have to do with marketing? Why marketing automation, thank you very much.

I noticed two predominate things at the On Demand Conference a few weeks ago. One is that most of the vendors are not talking about variable data print for customized and personalized communications per se. They are talking about variable print in concert with variable email, personalized URLs and even text messaging. They are also selling tools that enable complete campaign management with measurement. Has the variable data marketplace matured enough to cross the chasm?

If you are going to On Demand next week, please let me know. We can get together and talk shop. Or at least talk about what to do in Boston! My partner MJ Anderson and I will be presenting several sessions based on our experiences with cross-media marketing campaigns and the tools we use to make it happen.

I just finished my week back to work after Vegas and the second annual XMPie User Group conference. It is great to be with a group of likeminded people. At this point variable data communications and one-to-one marketing are still pretty small on the overall technology and marketing radar screens. It is wonderful to spend time with people who are as passionate about what we do as we are.

The Marketing Console tracking and reporting tool from XMPie is a significant step forward in enabling true cross-media, multi-channel, multi-format campaign management. While Trekk has designed and implemented cross-media campaigns for many years, tracking and reporting is often difficult and costly, thus challenging our ability to deliver complex campaigns and improving measureable marketing return on investment. Are you going to the XMPie User Conference this year? Is so, you will find my partner MJ Anderson and myself discussing how we use Marketing Console and other XMPie tools for our client work.

In previous blogs I have mentioned a recent book called “Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to be Smart” by Ian Ayres. Super Crunching is all about using computers to crunch through large datasets with mathematical techniques. Using randomized testing, cluster, regression and multivariate analysis, you can improve decision making in numerous business activities. The book has a number of real world examples that illustrate such uses.

The title of my post is a quote that has been attributed to management and quality guru’s from W. Edwards Deming to Peter Drucker. Measurement of processes is central to many continuous improvement methodologies from Total Quality Management to Six Sigma and Kaizen. At Trekk, measurement and ‘Launch and Learn’ are two principles we talk about daily in regard to our marketing and communications programs. Today I would like to talk a little about measurement and our web site.

I would like to discuss a few more of the technical features of the web site. One of the most visible of these features is the type-ahead search box. Try to type anything into the search input field near the top of this page. Each time you enter a keystroke, a number of content items will appear below. What is going on, I think is pretty cool.

As you can see, we have updated the look of our site this week. Why a new look so soon? Well, we are taking our own advice about launch and learn. While my blogging companions, MJ and Mike, will talk about the creative and strategic rationale behind the changes, I will talk about the technical underpinning.

I mentioned last time that many wireless devices with web-browsing capabilities ignore the style sheet references. By creating HTML content that is devoid of layout and style, your site can be made available to many wireless users as well. While true, I am afraid that the issue of wireless support is not always that simple.

In my last blog entry we talked about the use of XML and XSLT which enables content and format to be separated. By being separate, different formats can be applied that are appropriate for different media and channels. This is the cornerstone of Cross-Media.

In the summer movie Transformers, the commander of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, has the ability to transform himself from one machine into another, depending on circumstances. Similarly we can use eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transforms (XSLT) to translate one XML schema and content into another schema, or any text based file format.

I have heard a time or two that Trekk seems have too many services available to our clients for a company our size. How can we be good at so many different things? When we describe our vision of cross-media, like we did a few weeks ago at Graph Expo, we sometimes hear things like “No one can do all of that”.