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The popularity of the marketing measurement movement seems to have every PR-hungry consultant jumping on the “survey says” bandwagon to create some “content”. You know the type. “We asked 1,000 people what they thought about….”

The answers are supposed to provide you, the marketing executive, with a benchmark of what your “peers” are doing, so you can gauge the relative performance of your own company or department. Only they don’t. They just manipulate your desire to know and play off of your lack of technical knowledge in reading research results.

Analytics are increasingly the lifeblood of a CMO’s accountability process. And we’ve seen marked advancements in these tools, as marketers turn up the pressure for more usable insight.

In the aggregate, I see four key trends shaping the analytics space:

With all the hype surrounding the resurgence of legendary on-screen boxer Rocky Balboa, I couldn’t help but borrow a line from the old Clubber Lang (Mr. T) in anticipation of what 2007 will bring for marketing measurement. He said, “My prediction… pain.”

In the case of marketers, that pain is likely to be felt most by some of the late adopters to measurement discipline. In fact, marketers who haven’t yet made a concerted effort to get a suitably comprehensive and properly stakeholdered measurement process in place are likely to feel the pain more than ever in 2007. Why?

No single metric — especially not ROI — will suffice in providing all the data a company needs for making appropriate day-to-day and long-term decisions about marketing resource allocations. Instead, dashboards — which integrate a company’s key performance indicators into a centralized strategic view — are crucial to a firm’s ability to understand overall effectiveness and efficiency, as well as identify which efforts affect the bottom line.