“Interesting”, you might say, “but how is this related to digital”? Well the video  may appear to be about direct marketing but it raises some very pertinent questions for digital marketers too!

In the clip above, Target has achieved every marketers’ dream – being able to predict what the consumer would like to buy and when – in fact they've done this so accurately that it has actually worked against them in this case.

Digital marketers like to do this too and they have even more powerful tools at their fingertips. When a company sends a mass email out, unlike more traditional advertising and marketing methods, the company is able to track exactly which customer responded to which offers via click-through data.

They can observe the individual’s behaviour on their website: which pages they responded to, purcased from or shared via social networks; where on the site they spent the most time; and which page they finally left the website from.

Although most companies wouldn’t do this level of granular analysis on individual behaviours, companies with large volumes of traffic can begin (at the very least) to guage which campaigns are working, what messages work for which demographics and at what point they will buy, and to adapt their campaigns accordingly.

The recently released Sitecore 6 CMS allows website owners to tailor the content that is displayed according to previous activity - a powerful tool meaning those interested in a certain topic (i.e on a page or blog post about pets) can then be shown pet offers or taken to the pet offer page. This means websites can be much more targetted (if you forgive the pun!) and we will begin to see more and more companies using amassed historical user data to promote products which are increasingly relevant to the individual viewing the site.