Why is this bad? Because most Internet “consumers” don’t understand that cookies are generally harmless and they make the Web a more interesting, relevant place. Very few are designed to look up your proverbial skirt, but rather than coming down hard on the ones that do, the ICO threatens a £500k fine to any business in violation of their new directive.

I’d much rather be able to find great content and have great content find me on the Web than to roam with total anonymity on a Web that’s agnostic to my preferences and interests. This is exactly what might happen without analytics and tracking cookies to help website owners improve their content and spend scarce advertising dollars where they could make the most difference.

While the regulation excludes cookies that are “strictly necessary” for the service requested, regulations such as this should exclude cookies that contain non-personally identifiable information. Thankfully, companies have a year exemption to figure out how to implement this one.

Let’s hope smarter Browsers and wiser regulators prevail in the US.

His mandate was unambiguous – report on the business achievements from marketing, not on activities or program status. I used web traffic, visitor behavior, lead conversions and lead scoring to evaluate marketing execution and the sales pipeline. But, we quickly realized the bigger picture — we were now looking at the business as a whole through a different looking glass, and one constructed by the response of our target audience to what we thought they wanted to hear.

We started looking at visits and page views to see what messages were working to drive traffic, but new questions came up. Did our product roadmap align with visitor interest? Were our visitor roles who we thought they would be? What information were different visitor segments searching for on the website? What constituted a high quality website visit? Product management got involved when the conversation moved past program execution because it was their value proposition we started to question. When the discussion moved to what constituted a high quality lead, Sales piped in.

My point is this: when Demand Generation opened the proverbial kimono to web and pipeline data, we stepped out of assuming the role of smartest guy in the room and we opened the conversation across teams about how to improve business results – which is the charter you hear a lot of pundits talk about for marketing. Often, we didn’t have answers to questions, but we knew how to evaluate website traffic and we could slice and dice visitor traffic for insights. Clearly we still owned the task of improving marketing ROI, but now we had a more extensive dialog than “how many leads came in this week” and a more substantial role than providing program status in response.

The best part, we had one set of numbers to debate, and we didn’t need to leave the office for new data points. They were right in front of us on our Google Analytics dashboard. We had another way to listen to our target audience.

Here’s what I mean. By emphasizing the value of listening and responding to our target market, the newer marketing tactics around social media and email change give us a sounding board. Web and “revenue analytics” help marketers extend the learning we are gaining from social media with observations gleaned from visitor reaction to our campaigns and their behavior on our web pages.

Why is this important? Because web analytics makes it possible to develop correlations between visitor behavior and future revenue. Just as important, it helps deconstruct aggregate behavior to allow us to form actionable intelligence on geographic, product and demographic segments.

For worldwide demand generation programs, the need to localize and coordinate campaigns globally has always been recognized. Now, tools like Google Analytics open the door to a deeper understanding of the business and the entire web presence in much higher fidelity than what was possible just a few years ago. So the debate about Marketing ROI doesn’t need to be confined to lead quantity and quality. It can open up an opportunity for a much more revealing conversation about the state of the company through the target customers’ looking glass.

Just look at how much marketing tools like Google Adwords and Marketo have changed — in the last 12 months they’ve been significantly enhanced yet both have probably changed half as much as 2009′s marketing darling — social media. It’s obvious. Marketing is being reinvented before our eyes and transformed by the digital environment surrounding us.

How did you spend the Summer? Let’s say you launched a new website, took your summer vacation, and did a trade show or two. Then Sales wanted a new brochure and a white paper. No doubt you’ve been busy, but maybe you’re not quite up to speed on new capabilities like Revenue Cycle Analytics or Interest-Based Advertising. And, did you make sure your IT team inserted the new Asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code in your website? In less time than it took to complete a baseball season the tools changed significantly and so did the use cases.

This doesn’t mean that as a marketer you can’t and shouldn’t continue what you are doing, and by making the statement I’m not claiming to be immune from having to run hard keep pace. But, as marketers we simply can’t adjust strategy or execution for new capabilities that we don’t know exist, and it’s hard to track them all when you have a full time day job.

To stay at the top of their game marketers probably need to spend 20% or so of their time keeping pace with new developments and understanding the crossovers to other disciplines. In some cases, keeping pace means getting re-certified as a practitioner. And, if the screeches and groans of advertising professionals on the Google Help forum are any indication, (re)certification can be painful. It can also be time consuming and expensive.

But, why should businesses need to pay for learning and experimentation with digital marketing techniques when all they really want are the results from marketing? Strange question coming from a marketer, I know.

In a way analogous to separating the presentation layer from software, should digital marketing be designed out of marketing organizations and into a specialty practice to better serve corporate goals? Clearly I think so, but that’s not the point of this post.

What digital marketing disciplines should be brought in-house as core competencies and which should be outsourced?

What is the blend of in-source and out-source services that maximize total output so the entire ecosystem becomes more efficient?

In an environment where companies hire and shed marketers disproportionately with the upturns and downturns of the economy, can Marketing-as-a-Service find as much purpose and success as Software-as-a-Service?

These are the type of questions I’ll explore in this blog. I hope you will join in a conversation and share your thoughts.