Commentary

Media Insights Q&A With IAB's Sherrill Mane

Sherrill Mane began her career in research. Over time, at companies like Nielsen and CNN, Sherrill evolved from researcher to sales marketing strategist. In her current role as senior vice president for industry services at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Sherrill is responsible for IAB industry relationships and member activities, including the establishment of standards, best practices and growth. In her interview with me, she talks about IAB's standards of measurement, the future of television, the Internet landscape, cross-platform and the IAB's ground-breaking study with The Harvard Business School.

Below is a short excerpt. Direct links to the full interview videos (along with links to the studies mentioned below) can be found at the WeislerMedia blog.

CW: Sherrill, you have been at the IAB for a little over two years. How has the interactive landscape changed -- or not -- since you started?

advertisement

advertisement

SM: That is a really hard question to answer, because it is such a dynamic business that change occurs sometimes momentarily, sometimes daily, sometime weekly, sometimes monthly -- and the speed that the change is occurring, the magnitude, is far greater than anything I have ever seen in traditional media. It is astounding to me.

What I have seen happen in fundamental change is [that] advertisers and agencies are no longer saying "Yes, digital is nice." They really are embracing it. They really want to harness its power. There is a clear understanding that if you do not understand digital and you do not move your businesses forward and you do not go through transformation, you may very well be left in the dust.

When I got here, that was not as clear. Digital was still an amazing opportunity. It was an experiment. It was "Yes, we will do it to be sexy," or "Yes, we will extract added value from the media seller."

It is now an integral part of how many marketers think about how you use media in order to build a brand, sell a product, sell a service. That to me is the transformational change. Whether or not they actually implement or spend enough is a whole other question.

But the fact that mentally, intellectually the outlook is that you must use digital media, that is a big, big change. I don't think the dollars are there yet, and the dollars should be there. That is part of why we try so hard for our members to create standards, to create transparencies to make it possible for people to easily incorporate digital media of all kinds in their plans.

CW: Can you talk about some of the cross-platform work you are doing?

SM: Yes. One of the studies that we released most recently was done by Bain and Company. Of course that is a different kind of research -- it is more in the B to B area -- and they interviewed 700 marketers to find out what this industry needs to do to garner better share of dollars for brand advertising.

The study is called "Building Brands Online" and one of the clear findings was [that] marketers truly desire creative cross-platform opportunities. Again, it plays back to what we talked about earlier about all of the wonderful opportunities that digital presents. But the fact [is] there is room for buying media and creating marketing plans that are certainly not in isolation or restricted to one medium. So the reality is, the bigger ideas that use digital and traditional media together are ones that can win.

In addition to that, since we are aware of the value that cross platform brings to the business, we have been looking at proposals we have received in response to an RFP for a study on digital video and television advertising, and how the two work together.

The second initiative that is underway is that we are working with MarketShare Partners to explore prototypical media mix and marketing mix modeling. We are going to be looking at a number of key verticals and isolating what is prototypical within those verticals and how the mix of media works together.

So all of these are really major initiatives, and we are hoping that the research gives us the kind of insight that will permit us to really make some headway in the marketplace and permit us to give some insights to our members and the broader advertising and marketing community.

Next story loading loading..