Below the Line (BTL) marketing is a tectonic shift from mass media marketing to interactive marketing in the large and fragmented global media marketplace across multichannels. BTL marketing is not about reaching out to the masses but more about the superfine customer segments as well as cross-selling and up-selling to customers already known to the data-driven marketing organizations. Combining marketing information from the variety of BTL activities including word-of-mouth, leads to an overwhelming customer response in real-time. This data requires a customer analytics data mart enabling predictive modeling, to determine the best response to customers.

Until only recently, the fashionable advertising trend was all about Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Rushing headlong into this world at the turn of the century, many organizations realized that they failed to properly engage the world of digital media by taking an integrated approach. This had the appearance of making the possibilities of digital media pale into insignificance when compared to traditional physical media, purely based on budgetary allocations. Today, the marketing trend in vogue is `Below the Line' (BTL) marketing which originates from marketing initiatives that occupy relatively small budgets unlike the big budget attempts to achieve brand awareness, reach and recall, leading to potential purchase. Budgets in the digital world are based on a clicks per 1,000 basis and translate to being many orders (e.g., 10 to 20) of magnitude smaller than newspaper advertising.

More importantly, unlike the measures of brand awareness, reach and recall, the digital initiatives can be tracked to achieve actual sales. This is in stark contrast to using circuitous measures purporting to represent a proportion of consumers recalling the name of the product who may not necessarily purchase the product. Thus, entering the digital world, we have transferred the cost per request to an actual cost per acquisition. This is a world of difference from spending on reach and frequency rather than actual receipt of the direct customer responses.

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