• by Adam Herman , June 13, 2002

For the Internet to be accepted as a true advertising force, media planners must have the same research tools that they have come to expect when planning television, radio, print, and any other medium. However, until recently, online media has not kept up with offline media in the area of competitive analysis reports.

Competitive spending and activity reports have been a mainstay in a media planner’s arsenal. It allows them to see where the competition is advertising, what types of creative they are using, when the ads are running, and how many dollars are being spent. Plans can then be constructed to fight the competition head-on or to advertise in a less cluttered environment.

Agencies are not the only ones that find this data useful. Sales people also devour these reports to see what ads competitive properties are receiving and to prospect for new advertisers who are spending in their marketplace.

In the online world, there are a few major players that provide this service: AdRelevance, AdNetTrackUS (CMR’s Internet arm), and Evaliant (formerly Leading Web Advertisers). Evaliant offers a good example of how comprehensive the research and reporting has become. Evaliant’s client base of 120 advertising agencies, advertisers, websites, and sales representatives receives virtually real-time data on over 2,700 U.S. websites and 85,000 brands daily. This service, which starts at $24,000 per year, is web-based and is detailed in the following reports: New Brands to the Web, Advertisements by Brand and by Site, New Advertisements by Brand and by Site, Yesterday’s New Advertisements by Brands and by Site and the just released Adspend by Brand.

Today Evaliant, like the other ad tracking companies, primarily tracks web spending, but that will change. “As advertising expands into other digital venues, like wireless, we will add these to our tracking domain,” said Michael Kubin, Co-CEO of Evaliant.

Evaliant’s data is derived through its proprietary spidering technology, which combs thousands of the websites everyday, processing hundreds of thousands of images including banners and buttons of all sizes and shapes, pop-ups, interstitials, and some rich media. The data is then sorted in a multi-tiered classification schema that places the images in over 40 industry categories to facilitate searches and analysis.

To illustrate how useful a competitive report is, on the following pages, we look at the advertising activity of one new brand, on the day it launched, to see what competitive intelligence is available to help media planners and buyers. As you will see, online competitive research is becoming as sophisticated and useful as offline research and this will only give more ammunition to planners who are looking to increase their brand’s online budget.

MediaPost VP of Operations Adam Herman can be reached at adam@mediapost.com.