Last week on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we covered how recent acquisitions of data-focused companies by enterprise technology organizations are giving us a glimpse at the future of data-driven marketing. While the aforementioned acquisitions have been telling, similar events in other areas of marketing also give us insight into the strategic thinking of companies that are pushing marketing forward on many fronts. Beyond just the interest in data analytics, organizations are buying up smaller companies in various types of mobile advertising firms, social media specialties, and more to quickly strengthen their arsenal and expertise.

If you’re in the marketing or advertising business, it’s becoming increasingly important to remain viable and relevant by keeping up with new and upcoming trends in the industry. This exercise ensures that your business is prepared for what’s coming down the pipeline in terms of possible new channels, tools, and methodologies to utilize. While it’s great to learn the inner workings of the latest campaign or conversation management platform, taking a step back and considering the broader activities occurring in the industry can provide a more complete perspective on what’s just around the corner. One way to do this is to keep an eye on the acquisitions within the marketing and advertising technology space. We often reference acquisitions as they relate to specific topics that we cover on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, such as mobile marketing. By looking at a number of recent acquisitions related to the marketing space, we can see that the next generation of marketing will be increasingly targeted and tracked, largely driven by data intelligence.

In real life, reputation and trustworthiness can go a long way. For citizens, these factors are at the core of our relationships with one another. For businesses, these factors can make or break how a company is perceived by the eyes of its existing and potential customers… and this can have a positive or adverse impact on the bottom line. In many ways, these same factors play similar roles in peoples’ Web-connected, online lives. Building relationships between people online, especially on social networks, often involves a layer of trust. For example, suppose you’re connecting with a friend from college on Facebook or connecting with someone on LinkedIn that you just met at a conference. These online connections have some influence on your overall reputation, and they need to be maintained accordingly. Individuals need to maintain their online reputations, and companies need to do the same. For businesses, the process of maintaining a reputation is certainly important but sometimes unwieldy.

You may have seen them, or possibly heard about them being popular in Japan. They’re showing up on posters in movie theatres, on packages in supermarkets, and on some floor displays. They’re in the magazines we read, and they’re even showing up on billboards and in store windows in the city. We’re talking about mobile barcodes, and they’re showing up more often in everyday life in the United States. While we’ve discussed various forms of mobile marketing on Tuesdays with Tukaiz (such as text messaging and mobile applications), mobile barcodes are quickly becoming another option that marketers and advertisers can use in their mobile arsenals to generate responses and results.

As the mobile population continues to grow, the level of user sophistication with mobile technology will also increase. Mobile device makers continue to pack more functionality into a technology that fits in your pocket or the palm of your hand. Developers continue to create mobile applications that harness that power. Users are adapting to this technological evolution as they upgrade their phones and experiment with the next generation of apps. One feature that’s increasingly finding its way onto smartphones and other mobile devices (including cameras and tablets) is GPS.

Renewable energy is the source of our power for the future. Energy options such as solar, wind, geothermal, and even wave energy have the potential to give society a way to dramatically reduce its dependence on fossil fuel energy. Growing plans to create different types of renewable energy power plants have helped to drive the discussion. Many of the options that are currently available can help a business to convey its sustainability intentions to customers. As we discussed last week, Park & Co. has already taken multiple steps to help curb and control its carbon footprint. Marketing and advertising firms have a wealth of options that can help businesses show their customers that they care about the effects of pollution. Many of these firms offer solutions that can stop or even reverse these effects.

As we discussed in last week’s blog, marketing and advertisement agencies can use Chain of Custody Certifications to their advantage in the pursuit of developing their sustainable marketing initiatives. There are already many examples of companies taking the initiative to produce their paper-based marketing materials with certified content. Organizations like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, and even Chevrolet have all taken steps to becoming more sustainable through the use of certified paper. At the same time, however, using sustainable materials within marketing campaigns is not the only area in which companies are pursing sustainability. We have seen a steady growth in the number of options that marketing and advertisement firms can leverage in their pursuit of sustainability.

Google uses words like “transparency” and “choice” to describe its privacy center. While this company has certainly received its own shares of privacy complaints, these two words pretty much captured the essence of what marketers and advertisers need to provide to weather concerns over data privacy. In their efforts to project transparency, it has become a common practice for companies to post their privacy policies online. In their basic structure, privacy policies detail companies’ practices in data collection, use of cookies (if any), and the data sharing practices of third parties and affiliates. For those interested, the Better Business Bureaus provides some basic guidelines on creating a privacy notice. To add more credibility to these policies, some companies brand their sites with a seal of approval from sources such as TRUSTe. While these privacy policies tend to read more like legal disclaimers and are generally buried at the bottom of a homepage, they will at the very least provide concerned users with the opportunity to make informed decisions about the risks of sharing their personal information.

When it comes to privacy considerations, most individuals simply want to ensure that certain boundaries are not breached. Data privacy is no exception. In recent years, the media has increased its coverage on data privacy, helping to create more public awareness about how information is used (and sometimes abused). Marketers and advertisers have an incentive to create their own privacy policies to show customers that they understand this issue and that they are taking steps to protect the information that customers might not want to share. This self-regulation shows a company’s commitment to its customers when handling sensitive, identifying information.