• by kyle , Daisy Whitney , October 29, 2009

Brand marketers look for online's GRP

Clicks have made us fat and lazy. And when we wind up set in our ways, there's only one solution - weaning. In this case, we need to be weaned off the click.

That's what the online marketing world needs right now to improve branding, according to eMarketer and experts it surveyed across the Internet ad business.

In a recent study, eMarketer found that while 57 percent of marketing executives said brand measurement was not holding back online advertising, an astonishingly high 43 percent said it was.

"Clicks and banner ads tell so little of a story," says Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer and the author of a recent report on reinventing online brand measurement.

Research from iProspect and Forrester found that Internet users were more apt to search for a product, brand or company - or even type the company's name into a browser bar - than to click on a promotional ad. That's why measuring time spent, influence, engagement and responsiveness to ads is more important than measuring the actual click.

"People don't just see an ad or billboard and do something immediately - it happens over time," Ramsey says. "What we have to do is the hard work and wean ourselves off the click."

Of the $25 billion spent on online ads each year, about $7.7 billion is allocated to branding ads, such as display and video. "But unlike search, which is a $12 billion business, we don't know what that $7.7 billion is doing for us," Ramsey explains. "If we figure it out, that number will grow. Search and online video are the two engines driving Internet growth, and search has slowed. We really have to figure out the branding component and apply to video or we will be stagnant."

Working collaboratively to share data points can help. In addition, the solution will likely include attribution modeling, or capturing the data around both online and offline ad exposure and giving each their due. But the answer also lies in an old-school method, one that for better or worse has worked in television for more than 50 years - Gross Rating Point (GRP).

Nielsen is not perfect, yet it has become a common currency and people say we need to embrace the grp to get Internet into the media mix more," Ramsey says. "If you can't talk the language of the marketer, which is grp, then you are missing something and not getting on brand marketers' tables."

Young-Bean Song, senior director of analytics at Microsoft's Advertising Institute (formerly Atlas) agrees. He told eMarketer, "I think it's not having those foundational reach, frequency and GRP metrics. You will never see P&G and Unilever spend more than single digits [in millions] unless we give them reach, frequency and GRPs."

Ramsey is one of many voices in the industry that has been calling for big change in how Internet marketers evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. Gian Fulgoni, the chairman of comScore, has also said at MediaPost events that clicks are no longer the Holy Grail of online measurement, with time spent and brand lift being more important metrics. Similarly, Microsoft's Advertising Institute recently said in a report that conversion should be measured across the entire digital purchase funnel and not merely by the last ad seen or the last click.

Indeed, measurement is the constantly hashed and rehashed topic at industry events, but perhaps the answers lie not in more data but in a better way to capture the interactions consumers have with brands online, relying on some tried-and-true methods, some sharing and some new strategies.