I’m a customer of a little company called CountryWide Financial, a holding company of various financial and banking services, including insurance, mortgage, commercial loans and capital markets. Actually, they’re one of the largest financial companies in America, with many thousands of customers who trust them to safeguard personal data. Like many financial companies, CountryWide frequently changes and upgrades its security policy for handling online transactions. But the latest upgrade ensures that I will never use the CountryWide site again to handle transactions, and it’s an issue that has enormous impact for marketers who are charged with safeguarding customer relationships and brand image, if not directly responsible for customer data.

When I recently went to the CountryWide site to carry out a transaction, they stopped me at the door and introduced a new security policy. It started out in an intriguing new direction. To safeguard against phishing—situations in which an imposter hosts a lookalike site and lures customers to enter personal data which can be used to access and pillage the real account—CountryWide has instituted a personalized authentication image and statement. The idea is that the customer chooses a random image—say a tractor, or a telephone, or a leaf—and enters a random site ID phrase of their own choosing, such as “Holy Retinal Scanner, Batman!” Whenever the customer returns to the CountryWide site, they can authenticate that it is indeed CountryWide by the presence of their secret personal image and phrase. Very cool. I haven’t personally seen this concept before, and it’s kind of a cool idea. Great.

So I continue on to the next stage of the new security protocol, where I’m prompted to select a series of security questions, and to provide responses, which will be used to authenticate me in the future. Nothing really new here—how many times have I entered the name of my pet or my mother’s maiden name. But as I started to look through the security questions, it started feeling a little creepy. These weren’t the standard security questions, but an entirely new breed of questions that have some scary implications.

• What is your best friend’s first name?
• What was the name of the maid of honor at your wedding?
• What is the first name of your oldest nephew?
• What was the name of your first boyfriend/girlfriend?
• Where did you first meet your spouse?
• What is the nickname of your grandfather?

And on they go. Now I should point out that you can choose from these questions, and others a little less probing, like the name or city of your high school. But you must choose three questions, and these kinds of really personal and unique questions are prevalent. As I started to fill out one of these questions, thinking “gee, this is really specific”, I suddenly got a cold premonition. Wait a minute. I realize these are questions designed to safeguard my identity and personal data, but these companies have a really nasty habit of losing this kind of data, not to mention shifting privacy rules in ways that seem to make more and more data available for purposes I didn’t want. Not only are major breeches of customer data common, they include outrageous breeches by many of the most trusted financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citibank, Wachovia, FDIC, JP Morgan Chase—the list is literally too long to recite. And yes, CountryWide is not immune to its own security breaches.

I cannot imagine a more disturbing recipe for truly frightening levels of identity theft, than a database of information so personal and specific, that it could be used to impersonate you with a frightening level of authenticity. There are already plenty of instances of brazen identity theft, in which the perpetrators have gone as far as full-blown impersonation of their victim. Remember Frank Abagnale, the real life subject of Catch Me if You Can? What’s particularly disturbing is that the kinds of questions CountryWide is asking are not just specific and personal, many of them are permanent. Timeless. The name of your first girlfriend, where you met your spouse, will never change. Once that personal information is lost, you’ll never get a chance to recover it.

So while I applaud CountryWide for improving their security policy, and even taking creative steps to do so, I think these new measures of gathering personal information are disturbingly misguided for consumers. For many thousands of consumers, their first experience of security breach is when the institutions they trust lose their personal data through negligent loss or theft. In that regard, the first step in protecting your identity is safeguarding yourself from the probing questions of your service providers. And the marketers who manage the brands for companies like CountryWide should understand this fact better than their customers, since the backlash of losing such valuable data is far more costly than the value in collecting it.

I have to admit it took me a minute to figure out the relevance of this new mobile service and Web site for marketers. At first I thought the submission was yet another bit of spam. But a company profile and announcement came in for Concierge deLuxe–a global high-brow concierge service based in America that networks concierge providers in 80 countries. You can use the service to get a quick seat at a restaurant with a month-long waiting list, gain tickets to a sold out show or, if you’re in the mood, rent a luxury yacht for a weekend cruise on the Rhone.

Yeah, it’s a far cry from mobile advertising platforms and web analytics, but when I stopped to think about the times I’ve needed to entertain and impress an executive, or fix an impossible mess at an important event, I can definitely see the need to have a service like this in your back pocket. At $600 a year membership, plus expenses for any services you request, it’s a far cry cheaper than many alternatives.

Concierge deLuxe is launching with a private Intranet connecting 150 Concierges around the world to provide 24/7 support, connecting either by mobile device or standard telephone. Their mobile concierge service promises location-based information about local restaurants, shopping and entertainment, with access available through a personal assistant.

I have to say when I tried to call, the phone rang through to an answering service. Not the best start for a high-end concierge. But the concept is interesting, and if you’re in a business where you’ve got to support high-rolling customers or partners, it’s a well placed bet to have a concierge you can call on. Just do your due diligence before you buy a membership.

I spent a day at Unica’s Marketing Innovation Summit in Las Vegas, where they announced a new addition to their Affinium suite of Enterprise Marketing Management applications. Affinium Insightâ„¢ is a cross-channel analytics application that allows marketers to create visualizations of selected sets of marketing data drawn from different sources. For example, retailers who market both online and brick-and-mortar stores might use Affinium Insight to aggregate campaign and sales data to analyze the relationship between online and offline shopping behavior. The idea is to provide a single view of the customer across all channels of engagement, rather than the current siloed views of customer behavior and campaign response confined to different marketing channels or different marketing roles.

As an upfront disclosure, I spent two months earlier this year as an unpaid guest blogger for Unica’s Marketing Consortium blog, focusing on trends in social media. I don’t have a business relationship with Unica, past or present, but I share some affinities with their marketing team based on similar interests in marketing and technology. They’re a smart group, and very savvy about business and marketing. They invited me to the sold-out show in Vegas, along with about 600 other marketers, analysts and customers. The conference was a mix of seminars, training sessions and case studies, with of course a strong emphasis on Unica’s broad suite of enterprise marketing tools.

Affinium Insight is an important addition to Unica’s current suite of campaign planning, management, automation and analytics solutions. Although the applications all function as standlone solutions, the Affinium suite as an integrated whole is envisioned as a “marketing system of record”, which unifies not only the view of the customer, but the operations of many disparate marketing roles, including executives, analysts, creatives and managers. Affinium Insight perhaps represents the most potent single point of integration, with its focus on drawing many streams of data into a single analytical view.

During a demo of Insight, a number of scenarios were presented that offer a compelling value proposition for cross-channel analytics, and for Insight’s visualization capabilities as well. The most interesting scenario imagined a retailer–say BestBuy–analyzing the shopping behavior of customers in the vicinity of a local brick-and-mortar store. By pulling in demographic, campaign and sales data, a marketer can easily explore the complex relationships between different types of marketing campaigns and their impact on shopping behavior. Which demographic groups shop online vs. in store? What’s the impact of an online campaign on local in-store sales? How far out from the local store do those patterns start to shift?

The implications for marketing operations are significant, and in some ways I felt like I was getting a glimpse into the future of marketing, at least from a tactical standpoint. The ability to overlay many complex layers of data in order to generate simple but holistic views of customer behavior and campaign effectiveness is tremendously powerful. When those insights begin to impact market development, I can’t imagine that it won’t offer a competitive advantage to early adopters.

The interface for Affinium Insight is the same as the rest of the Affinium suite, and the application integrates seamlessly with the other Affinium applications, allowing direct analysis of data, for example, from Affinium Campaign, Unica’s enterprise campaign automation solution. Data can be imported from other applications as well, including SQL. It’s a Web-based application that seems easy to navigate, with drag-and-drop convenience for creating data sets. However, the complexity of building effective and insightful datasets would take some training and practice, suggesting the potential perhaps for some out-of-the-box templates to help marketers get started. I imagine user groups and professional services partnerships can’t be far behind.