User groups, blogs and forums will eventually be part of the company's marketing mix.

Mulligan is a first vice president of marketing acquisition at TDWaterhouse.

iMediaConnection: How has your job changed this year?

Mulligan: My current position is new to me having begun managing acquisition at TD Waterhouse in October 2003. In my past work experience, online advertising was not a significant part of the budget but TD Waterhouse it represents about 10 percent of total marketing spend. Thus, this year has been a huge learning curve about online advertising.

iMediaConnection: What surprised you in the online world this year?

Mulligan: The industry move to position online advertising as a branding tool versus direct marketing tool.

iMediaConnection: Have you realigned internal structures and resources to simplify or increase integrated marketing?

Mulligan: TD Waterhouse has been for the past four years a strong proponent and leader in integrating marketing. We have consistently aligned the messaging and creative across all medium, which includes online advertising, in time to ensure an integrated and consistent message.

iMediaConnection: How do you determine your marketing mix -- and how has the role of online in it changed?

Mulligan: You start with the historical mix and change based on success or failure results by tactic and new opportunities to test. The mix does not shift dramatically between years. It is evolutionary based on results and test opportunities. For now, we continue to use online advertising as a direct marketing tool.

iMediaConnection: What haven't you brought into the marketing mix yet that you want to try?

Mulligan: As a company, we have been slow to embrace user groups or forums. I would like to see TD Waterhouse in the future make this part of the marketing mix.

iMediaConnection: Have you seen specific evidence of online driving offline sales?

Mulligan: Yes, but limited. This question by its nature is very difficult to track. We can identify leads who navigate to our side from banner ads and open an account at a branch based on promotion codes.

iMediaConnection: Are you using consultants, software, agencies or other tools to help with search engine marketing?

Mulligan: We outsource search engine marketing to our agency. In addition, in 2005, we will be upgrading our Web site tracking capability with CoreMetrics which will provide additional search optimization functionality.

iMediaConnection: What do you believe is the future of ad agencies?

Mulligan: As online marketing spend grows, they will become an increasingly important player in bringing branding to online advertising and ensuring an integrating marketing mix.

iMediaConnection: What do we need to be doing as an industry to help you make Interactive marketing a bigger piece of your marketing pie?

Mulligan: Working with us to improve conversion and show direct business building results.

iMediaConnection: Are you being affected by any consumer-generated marketing (CGM) -- blogs, user groups, etc.? Are you using any blogs or other social networking tools to market?

Mulligan: Not using these tools yet, but we believe they need to become part of the mix.

iMediaConnection: How important is CRM in your marketing efforts? Give us an example of what's working.

Mulligan: CRM is a term which can mean many things.

iMediaConnection: What are you investing in now for next year's marketing program?

Mulligan: We are a major new product launch and will be expanding out to new niche placements since we are targeting a new target audience. Otherwise, an increase in spending with minimal changes in overall spending pattern.

iMediaConnection: Does anything still frustrate you about what online can or can't do?

Mulligan: Inability to measure different impact of awareness on conversion, many vendors are talking about the branding effect of online advertising. They have research to support impact on awareness but none are showing how the change in awareness affects conversion which if proven would drive increased spending. Inability to frequency cap impressions on many sites, research on this topic is beginning to show that after 10 impressions the improvement in conversion rate is almost zero. Yet most advertising is been consumed a by a small portion of frequent visitor. 

iMediaConnection: What blogs do you read?

Mulligan: None at this point.

iMediaConnection: What are your daily "must-see" Web sites and why?

Mulligan: Yahoo! and MSN since they are my key online properties and key competitive properties.

iMediaConnection: What are you reading these days, other than iMediaConnection.com, of course?

Mulligan: 'Wired Magazine,' 'Advertising Age,' 'The Wall Street Journal,' Forrester Research.