With the sponsorship of Acxiom, Digiday served up a survey to its audience, arguably among the most proficient practitioners in digital media today, to assess their marketing maturity. We did this by asking a series of questions designed to find out how many of the marketing levers at their disposal respondents actually used to interact with their existing and potential customers.

What we found was that far too many marketers are stuck in marketing adolescence. While they know the rudiments of how to layer data to achieve digital ad campaign results, very few claim they pull all the levers at their disposal to make the most of every consumer touch point. Fewer still use their knowledge to provide personalized and coordinated offers nurtured by consumer interaction and feedback. Those who can do so in real time might fit in an elevator.

Included in our survey were 359 agency, brand advertising, media pros and technologists. Two-thirds of them said their job involves sales, marketing or both. You can see how your segment stacked up on all 10 questions by downloading the full white paper here.  

In brief, it was the advertisers who seemed most focused on tracking their customers through all aspects of their cyber-life and combining everything they know about these individuals into differentiated approaches.

Nearly 60 percent of advertisers who were asked, “Has your company clearly identified your best customers” said “yes” in some fashion. But just 5 percent of them say they can cross-sell and up-sell customer segments using “significant analytic and measurement systems and offline and online data,” and just 12 percent of their agency collaborators can. The biggest surprise: Only 7 percent of media reps could do so -- surprising because of their presumed ability to marry offline circulation data to online registrations.

We then asked respondents whether they leveraged the knowledge their publishing partners have about their readers to identify prospects or personalize offers. Just 42 percent of advertisers use information they receive from publishing partners to identify future prospects, and even these folks don’t take the next step of personalizing offers to these consumers. Agencies lead in this marketing maturity metric, yet only 10 percent of respondents say they currently do both.

The real wash-out came when we asked, “Can your company recognize consumers’ interests during their interaction with your brand in real time?” Plenty of marketers can track such metrics as "likes" through social media proxies, and there are whole Twitter trending dashboards devoted to monitoring Internet buzz.

But if brands want to take things to the next level, where do they start? The marketing divas we asked responded with the statistical equivalent of a big shrug. More respondents answered “no” to this question than to any of the other nine questions in our survey. Advertisers were the most adamant. Forty-seven percent said they couldn’t discern consumer interests when interacting with their (customers’) brands in real time. Zero can do so across “both inbound and outbound channels with all interactions being stored in a central repository.”

That’s not to say advertisers aren’t trying or don’t want to understand their audience in real time. More than a quarter of advertisers say they can do so in social as well as one other channel, while 16 percent actively connect their channels to build a more complete portrait of what consumers are doing. Agencies rated best at this latter effort, with 23 percent saying they’ve taken on the “big picture.” But even agencies are most likely to derive their real-time feedback through social circuits, as 38 percent of agencies say they can respond to a discernable interest from consumers in real time – again, via social and perhaps one or two other channels.

This goes to the heart of what direct response is best at. If consumers are offered choices at the point of potential conversion, they can be nurtured in logically controlled response paths.

Other questions delved into how well marketers and media aggregate data to forge insights about their customers and target ads and – going one step further – using such data to predict customer response. Marketers, for the most part, know how to layer data to achieve campaign results, but taking this to the next level and deriving actual business intelligence from online consumer responses has far to go.