chocolate or whipped cream: both

WARC's US editor Geoffry Precourt report on a presentation by Carat's Mike Hess to ad:tech Chicago 2009.
Whilst I spare you the technical details, there is so much truth in the underlying analysis, which I quote here: '...The '80s were about forecasting models, about multi-varied analysis that supported psychographics. In the '90s, the emphasis was on panel data and marketing-mix modeling. In recent years - the naughts or the '00s - it's been all about the Internet and, finally, presenting data from the Internet in an integrated way. And while we don't have all the answers, we're moving toward them."
The biggest obstacle to integrating various sources of research, he said, is that "offline and online data have been operating in silos. The goal now is to integrate them and take advantage of their complementary nature."