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The other day my four-month old son Vivek was wearing this cute outfit with 3 little figures running down the front. They were of a dog, a rabbit and a bear. Each of them had their choice meal at hand with a line underneath that respectively read: I like Bone, I like Carrot, and I like Fish. Now I’m really a dog person but when it comes to Vivek, I’m papa bear. So I decided that I like fish.

What struck me about that image was its reflection of the state of how consumers think of themselves today. Every person has their unique likes and preferences. I like webcasts but my friend Matt prefers to view PodCasts, I love my crackberry but my friend Kumar swears by his iPhone and so on! In fact people’s likes (and dislikes) are so specific, the latest research* is showing that marketers can double their leads by converting the same assets into multiple media types to feed this unique appetite. (* TechTarget ROI Summit 2008)

Us marketers have also adjusted accordingly by slicing and dicing our end user segments every which way and incorporating persuasion architecture and persona marketing to “convert” each of our archetypes. (The very simplest form of conversion meaning getting them to their destination of choice.) Along the way we can track implicit and explicit data points about these end users’ preferences that help us target them accordingly.

However, at the end of the day the effectiveness of our targeting is extremely dependent on the accuracy of these collected data points and our ability to get our end users to opt-in. Google Adwords and other search-based contextual advertising engines can at best target end users at the point of search. I would get relevant ads for “marketing automation platforms” only when I search for that or similar terms. Would it be useful for Google to know my likes and dislikes even before I start searching?

Perhaps but that’s not what a “generic” search engine is built to do. Imagine that 70% of my searches are related to marketing, would it not be more effective to serve up some semi-relevant contextual ads or show me my favorite searches before the fact? Of course this is a bogus scenario and Google does not require a login where they could tie my searches to my account. All I am doing is demonstrating that the effectiveness of search based contextual ad-serving is limited to the point of search or at best to relevancy and relevancy can still be pretty subjective.

I would like to interject here that Yahoo! did a smart thing by acquiring Del.icio.us. Daily I’m letting Yahoo! know explicitly the kinds of content I have an appetite for, i.e. whether I like bone or carrot or fish. I don’t use Yahoo! search or portal enough to notice that data being used effectively to target me. But at some level I.

Enter FaceBook, an opt-in community where members can explicitly highlight their likes, preferences and demographic information. And on top of that it is a monster of a viral marketing machine. I specifically wrote in my profile that I like the band Counting Crows, and I consistently see an ad for their new album when I login to my account. The relevancy of the targeting goes way beyond the point of search. Tomorrow if I update my musical tastes, I’ll no doubt get a sticky ad related to my explicit taste. And this is just from the end user’s perspective.

From the advertiser’s perspective, through the FaceBook engine they can in most cases with 100% accuracy ensure that they touch not only the relevant choice but also the most relevant demographic. That is the double whammy power of the FB engine. Amazon could be considered very similar in that it knows many of the kinds of the bones, carrots and fish that I am fond of and very effectively serves up that meal when I am on their site. However the viral aspect is mostly absent and honestly, I don’t mind. I actually prefer it that way.

Perhaps in the ecology of the web each of these engines have their own place in the food chain. I use Google to learn from scratch, FaceBook to learn and share with others and Amazon to buy anything I want. But at the end of the day the most efficient system is the one that knows what I like: Bone, Carrot or Fish and that’s where I see FaceBook as the most innovative marketing technology since Google AdWords.