Commentary

Marketers Up New Media Spend, but Question its ROI

Digital advertising venues offer a plethora of data for marketers to mine, but there’s still not enough to prove ROI, including for online video. That’s the finding of a survey of more than 200 marketers conducted by the Association of National Advertisers this spring. The study released Monday and revealed that even as new media advertising on mobile phones, social media and online video grows, marketers still aren’t terribly confident in these platforms.

More than 70% of marketers are using new media platforms (shouldn’t they all be using new media to some degree?), but 62% say the inability to prove ROI is a big concern. They say they don’t have the right metrics to determine the proper mix of digital media and traditional media. 

In my view, this is an odd finding, since digital platforms, by and large, offer so many more ways to measure and prove results than do traditional venues. That’s why I suspect these results speak to the pressure that marketers feel overall to prove ROI more than in years past, rather than a particular problem proving it in digital forms. Nonetheless, Web sites and publishers would be wise to make ROI simpler to measure to assuage marketer concerns.

This is especially important in video, since brands’ use of online video had the largest growth year-to-year among new media -- with 80% using online video this year, up from 64% a year ago. Only half of marketers surveyed are even measuring ROI for online video, the study said.

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