This CMO says online has become the most efficient way to acquire customers.

Dean Harris is CMO for Vonage, a broadband telephone company. Harris heads all marketing efforts for Vonage including customer acquisition, branding and all offline and online communications. After training on traditional packaged goods (Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson) at two large New York ad agencies, Harris founded and ran a full service ad agency with accounts that included Coca Cola, Citibank, Nestle, Sotheby's and M&M Mars. In the late 1990s he became senior vice president of marketing for HotJobs.com, managing a $50 million budget. Then, he was named chief marketing officer at CarDay.com, a bricks-and-clicks used car exchange.

iMediaConnection: What was your biggest online "win" this year, and how did you sell it throughout the company?

Harris: We really don't think of it this way. Everyone in the company wins when we acquire customers and online has proven to be the most efficient way to do this.

iMediaConnection: How has your job changed this year?

Harris: My job has stayed the same for the most part, although our rapid growth has led to more business development opportunities.

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

Harris: Online advertising has been growing even more rapidly than I expected.

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

Harris: We have not realigned internally to do more integrated marketing. We were organized to do integrated marketing in the first place.

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

Harris: Our marketing mix is determined by successful cost of customer acquisition metrics.

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

Harris: We have tested almost every medium.

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

Harris: We have direct evidence of online driving sales. That is why we continue to invest in the medium.

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

Harris: We use the Carat Interactive search practice to help us run our robust search effort.

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

Harris: As someone who ran an ad agency for 20-plus years, I remain clueless as to the future of the agency world.

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

Harris: Interactive already represents the majority of our marketing budget. Continued growth and innovation in the online space will help us continue to reach and acquire customers online.

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?

Harris: We are not using blogs or networking tools, but are considering it.

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

Harris: CRM will be a bigger part of what we do going forward.

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

Harris: We are investing in the future every day.

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

Harris: I really don't understand the rationale for CPM based ad serving fees. Also, there is considerable inefficiency in the way online advertising is presented, bought and sold.

iMediaConnection: What blogs do you read?

Harris: I don't read any specific blogs on a regular basis.

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

Harris: I do read bigblueinteractive.com regularly because I believe that the football Giants are a team of destiny.

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

Harris: I read The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal daily. In addition, I'm always in the middle of about three books, although I do not discriminate between fiction and non-fiction.