Everything Is Related

When you pay close attention to a particular topic area, you begin to notice its connections to other tangential areas.

November 01, 2004 — CSO — When you pay close attention to a particular topic area, you begin to notice its connections to other tangential areas. CXO Media, which publishes CSO, recently launched CMO, a new monthly magazine for top marketing executives. Because I was involved in helping to develop this new property, Im now attuned to the marketing profession in ways I might not have been otherwise.

The effect is not quite like the old Reeses peanut butter cup commercials where a guy eating a chocolate bar turns a corner and collides with a guy eating from a jar of peanut butter (their foodstuffs intermingle and, voilà! a new taste sensation is born). But I do see security and marketing more often intersecting creatively and opportunistically. Just today I got an e-mail promoting the fact that a company called Atrua Technologies has won a round of venture funding for technology that extends touchscreen fingerprint recognition to cell phones and other mobile devices. Besides user authentication, the technology powers a touch-based user interfacethe finger becomes the input device. The growth in wireless applications depends on a number of factors, including users confidence in the security of the gizmos that carry the apps. So this fingerprint feature means that the device will know whos using it.

I met recently with a company called Vontu. Its founder, Joseph Ansanelli, previously headed a company whose software put big databases of highly valuable and potentially sensitive customer information into the hands of telemarketerspeople with a high rate of turnover who also happen to have access to the Internet. Ansanelli saw the inherent risks, and that spark of insight led him to create Vontu, which monitors employees e-mail messages and analyzes them for compliance with company policies. When I asked him whether he saw a convergence of interest between marketing and security, he noted, Marketing owns the databases. So, yes, absolutely. Further, he said, Theres the reputational cost that a company faces when data is compromised. And reputation is something every CMO cares very much about.

The premiere issue of CMO magazine includes a feature by occasional CSO contributing writer Fred Hapgood in which he discusses the potential benefit to marketing of (among other things) security surveillance systems coupled with machine-vision software that can be programmed to recognize characteristic human behavior. The value to security practitioners is obvious. But it also has high value to anyone interested in learning about the behavior of customers navigating retail space. Writes Hapgood, Marketing executives could...measure, for example, how many customers walked directly from one purchase to the next, how many explored the store systematically, how many wandered randomly and how many left without a purchase.