I recently saw a terrific presentation by Steve Smith, CMO of Enterprise Car Rental, in which he outlined the fairly comprehensive approach they were taking to measure the payback on their marketing investments. Here are a few highlights.

Between the pouring rain and bolts of lightning, MediaPost held its first OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference at the Yale Club this past Tuesday. The room was packed and the panels put forth some lively discussion and debate for the audience to ponder. For those who were not able to join us, let me recap a few highlights for you.

If you had anything to do with the Obama presidential campaign, you have not indulged in any post-election relaxation. Instead, you've been taking calls from conferences wanting you to speak. For the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose last August, I was lucky enough to get Mark Skidmore, Director of Advertising & Promotion at Blue State Digital on the podium.

When I was younger and stupid, I used to spend lots of passion, energy, and time around the development of terrifically insightful analyses. "Look at what the numbers tell us," I would proclaim. After days or weeks of combing through the hairiest of data sets, I'd emerge with new strategies for rationalizing the sales force; reallocating marketing spending; moving R&D dollars from one project to another; or providing better service to more valuable customers. All ideas that would have made or saved the company lots of money. Relatively few of them ever got implemented, however. Somehow, people always managed to …

As the economy sags along, with some signs of life, a few folks have been writing me to express their interest in Web analytics jobs, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to write a bit about what a Web analytics hiring manager looks for in the right candidates.

Last week marked the sixth anniversary of TNS Media and Compete's Digital CMO Summit and, despite the economic gloominess, attendees' outlook for digital marketing was quite bright. One hundred and fifty senior executives from top brands, agencies and media companies gathered in Newport, R.I. for two and a half days of presentations, knowledge-sharing and extensive networking. The event spawned new ideas about the future of marketing, some forward-looking and many instantly actionable. So, in the spirit of sharing, here are my top five takeaways from the event.

As we approach the 2010 planning season, I always like to take a few moments and reflect on the horrors of last year's planning cycle, making some commitments on how I can do it better this year....

On Tuesday, June 9 at the Yale Club in New York City, MediaPost will host the first OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference. For those of you who are long-time readers, you'll note that we metrics folks are always part of the OMMA conference series, but have never had our own day to dive into so many of the issues that we blog, tweet and email about.

You'll see up there on the top of the page that this column-blog is called the Online Metrics Insider. But really now, isn't "online" as a concept so Five Minutes Ago? I mean, are you ever OFF line? I know I'm not; right this very minute, as I work on this column, I'm downloading music, streaming an episode of Lost, and tweeting. At comScore we tend to think in terms of digital media as opposed to "online" media. I mention all this because this column is about the digital medium that, in today's U.S. media marketplace, commands the most adspend; …

When it comes down to measuring brand impact from a digital display campaign, there probably is no better tool than a survey-based ad effectiveness study. This seemingly foolproof design has one often-neglected flaw that may leave the reported overall ad effectiveness lift numbers inaccurate. The problem originates from a combination of the following two areas: the way the subjects are recruited/surveyed and the way the brand metric lift numbers are subsequently tabulated.