What Webtrends call the first generation of web analytics was backward-facing - measuring visitors, page views etc
The second generation took things further to also measure (I think) actions on the site......click-thru rates etc.
And they see the third generation as integrating all this data with offline data.
Such as customer transaction data.
To give you a 360 degree view of the customer.

For marketers, they talk not about the 4 P's (Product, Price, Place and Promotion), but the 4 R's:
1. Reveal
2. Reward
3. Respect
4. Retain.

Expanding on these.....
Reveal means understanding the current interests of visitors, so you can build a meaningful customer segmentation model.
Reward means rewarding behaviours with relevant offers and opportunities.
Respect in the sense that relevant offers lead to an increase in the trust and respect the customer has for the brand. (As opposed to repeatedly offering stuff a customer's so far failed to express any interest in). 
And Retain customers by stimulating them to interact with your products through fun and extensions........
they may have nothing to do with the products.......it's about community, web 2.0 tools, maybe games. (Note to self: idiosyncratic/customized/fun/quirky tag catalogs to describe particular video or podcast content).

The key concept for them was: engagement.
And: how do you measure customer engagement with a site? 
They showed the usual 'heat map'-type of mechanism to show where people had clicked.
Easyjet example
And they mentioned an interesting example: Easyjet.
Easyjet put a banner top left of their homepage in a contrasting colour (blue).
They thought this would be the hottest ad unit on the homepage.
Turned out it was the worst, out of 6 units they had on the homepage.
Seems the other ads - in good old EasyJet orange - didn't stand out as much, but they looked more like how Easyjet usually looks.
(In other words, more like editorial than advertising).
With price-driven messages the Easyjet customer is used to, and looks for.
Easy in hindsight, I guess.
They still have a blue ad top left, I just noticed:
http://easyjet.com/en/book/index.asp 

Think: events not pages
This was the catchcry that made sense to me.
The switch from measuring and thinking about page impressions and visitor numbers to what the customer's actually doing. 
And being able to develop segmentation models from that which become the basis for future marketing activity.
(Forward-looking).

The elephant in the room
As Jeremy Tang from Telstra/Sensis said afterwards, it's damned impossible in many if not most large organisations to integrate online and offline data in the way Webtrends describe.......
whether for technical or cultural or political reasons. 
But if things inevitably move from proprietary towards 'open' as markets mature, then this could well be where we're headed.
Yes? No?