As many a marketing manager and media planner turns their focus to 2008 (in fact, I'm better that a fair number of you have already turned in some preliminary budget numbers for '08, if not your entire budget and marketing plan) we're all challenged with where we're going to allocate dollars for our anticipated returns and ROI.

An intriguing post over at Get Rich Slowly and a story on NPR about David Swensen, who, for the past 21 years been Yale University’s investment portfolio manager, garnering an average 16 percent annual return! This is astonishing in that most of us are fortunate to sneak by with an average 7 percent across our investment and retirement stockpiles.

What's more interesting is the connection that's made in the blog post between what David feels is a intuitively balanced portfolio and the types of index funds (ETF - Exchange Traded Funds) that the everyman (or woman) could safely invest in and secure a comfortable return.

The chart below represents Swensena's basic formula for creating an investment portfolio likely to give you good returns while still managing risk: (via Get Rich Slowly)

This got me to thinking, what's your marketing portfolio look like? When you look at how Swensen's investment percentages break down with 20% in Real Estate and another 5% in Emerging Markets, I can't help but think that there are parallels in our marketing portfolio to things like brand building and awareness (long-term, stability investments) and new media and social media (emerging markets, high risk, potential for high return) and the list goes on..

ACTION ITEM: What's your marketing portfolio look like? Do you have enough invested in stable, slow growth areas like branding and awareness building for the long term or have your been bit by the latest marketing trend bug and shifted your investments into higher-risk marketing vehicles? Are you investing enough in customer retention, referral and reactivation like we invest in government bonds to renew our country or have those areas fallen out of favor because of their seemingly modest returns?

Take another look at your marketing portfolio before the ink dries on next year's budget!