Foghound Releases 2007 Marketing Predictions: More "Jon Stewartizing," Mash-ups and Marketing Nerds.

MARBLEHEAD, Mass. -- Communications strategy firm Foghound today released its second annual "Hound Trends," identifying 10 marketing trends predicted to heat up in 2007, and grading its 2006 predictions.

1. Virtual worlds explode and get branded. While Second Life continues to boom, companies will offer more manageable and intimate virtual worlds, like CokeStudios. Private branded virtual worlds not only appeal to people who are overwhelmed by Second Life expanse, but give marketers a new way to connect directly with customers and capture new types of customer data and insights.

2. More "Jon Stewartizing" of marketing and PR: Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" has changed how people consume TV news, getting more from smart comedians on the Comedy Central than the establishment networks' news broadcasters. Look for more companies to "Jon Stewartize" their Web content, sales meetings, PR programs, similar to what IBM did when it released its hilarious fake mainframe sales training videos on YouTube.

3. More marketing mash-ups: Look for more companies to create interesting mash-ups, combining content from multiple sources to create new types of experiences and services. See Business Week's article, "Mix, Match and Mutate," for a quick overview, and check out the Sun Labs Snapp Radio mash-up of Radio Paradise, last.fm and Flickr.

4. Service innovation trumps product innovation: While innovation has focused on product innovation, more and more companies will begin looking at how to innovate services because service has such an influence on customer preference and loyalty. Service innovation firms, like Peer Insight, will become more influential than product innovation specialists.

5. Business intelligence shakes loose its shackles: Business intelligence, while valuable, has been confined to analyzing structured data. New technologies that can analyze unstructured data - like call center notes, blog postings, email exchanges - opens up valuable new insights, making it easier to pinpoint opinion leaders, categorize emerging issues and assess attitudes and sentiments towards brands and companies. Keep an eye on this new breed of BI companies like ClaraBridge.

6. Blogger fatigue escalates: More people will tire of reading so many blogs, and will narrow down their daily reading and posting. In fact, The Gallup Poll recently signaled the turn, reporting that blog readership slowed down in 2006 after five years of strong growth.

7. Marketing geeks got some respect. The science side marketers get more respect - and become much more in demand, filling the underserved market need for professionals steeped both in business strategy and business modeling, predictive technologies and analytics.

8. Web 2.0 over-hypes: mania over digital marketing and communications goes into over-drive with shades of dot.com hype all over again, including the good, the bad and the ugly. Social networking, blogs, communities become more relevant and valuable, but beware that they're not for every business.

9. Face-to-face meetings back in style: While more people meet up in virtual words and connect via blogs, even more people will opt for face-to-face conversations, meetings and conferences. According to the National Business Travel Association, 67.7 percent of corporate travel managers expect business travel to be up in 2007.

10. "Interactive" departments go away, folding into mainstream marketing, as marketers now see "e" as core to marketing and not "new media and marketing."

Grading the 'hounds' 2006 predictions

* New market concepts vs. new products: A. Just look at the wild successes of YouTube and Second Life.

* Consumer insights vs. market research: B- . Even the big global market research associations started focusing more of their research and conferences on consumer insights. This year ESOMAR gave its inaugural award for best conference paper to three Australians who likened the marketing industry's preoccupation with brands to a worn out, struggling heart, and suggested that a new customer-centric vision for business is the equivalent of a heart transplant.

* Communities as big as blogs: B. Social network communities like MySpace boomed, as did the growth of private communities, developed by companies like Communispace. You know it's a trend when mainstream media write about it, as Business Week and Ad Age did on communities.

* Meaning making vs. promoting, point of views vs. messaging, teach me vs. tell me: B. More companies are changing their style - talking more about ideas and less about themselves -- and getting thumbs up from customers. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog, with approximately 20,000 readers a day, is a great example, as is HP's Change Artists executive interview series.

* Salons vs. conferences: C+. Still a lot of talking heads, in giant conference rooms. Two great examples of more salon style events: the Business Innovation Factory's BIF2 Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, hosted by The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, and the Innovative Marketing Conference at Columbia University, held by Columbia's Center on Global Brand Leadership and Corante.

* Podcasts vs. Webinars: A+. Podcasts exploded, providing a better way to download a broadcast or listen to it on your PC when you want vs. when the sponsor wants you to listen. Approximately 55% say they're more likely to consume thought leadership via a podcast, according to KnowledgeStorm research.

* Behavioral vs. demographic targeting: B. Online behavioral targeting strategies and analytic tools went mainstream. According to a Forrester study cited in ClickZNews, 73% of marketers now employ or plan on employing behavioral targeting.

* Voices of the customer vs. voice of the company. C. Consumer generated media exploded, and analysis services from companies like Cymfony, and Nielsen/BuzzCompanies grew considerably, indicating that companies are investing more around listening to customer conversations. Yet in talking with many big name companies we found that there's more monitoring on what's being said than real "listening."