• by Tom Hespos , August 16, 2005

Online branding has come a long way in the past decade or so. Some of us may recall the early days of online advertising when many advertisers followed Procter & Gamble's lead in proclaiming that they would pay for their ads based on how many clicks the ads received. I remember Dave Dowling at Media.com setting the precedent in the mid-1990s by putting P&G's budget behind the cost-per-click model. At the time, many of us thought that such an approach devalued the brand value of the medium and placed it firmly in the camp of direct response media.

Since then, the brand value of online advertising has been established, thanks in large part to the ability of online to conduct brand surveys that neatly isolate the branding effects of online advertising. Companies like Dynamic Logic, Millward Brown, and Factor TG have allowed their clients to gauge lift in brand metrics for years now and brand studies have been a mainstay of brand advertisers' campaigns for quite some time.

A typical brand study can measure several critical brand metrics, most notably brand awareness, purchase intent, and brand favorability. Customized surveys can enable a study to measure much more. Brand awareness is typically only a component of what is measured.

But many online advertisers, agencies, and publishers tend to confuse brand awareness with online branding in general. There's so much more to it than that.

For instance, we are embarking on a brand study with one of our clients who recently repositioned themselves in the market. Essentially, they've created a whole new category and message with their advertising. One of the things we will do is measure how the concept fares with people who use their product or are considering purchasing it. The survey may also include a component to measure how their print ads are getting the concept across. From the study, we hope to learn how the message is resonating and how the target audience is associating the concept with the client and their product.

Obviously, this represents a departure from measuring simple awareness and will involve exploring the association between the client and the message. While measuring awareness would give us only a measure of whether prospects are aware of the company or the product, measuring message association gives us an idea of how well prospects are receiving the new concept and whether or not they associate it with the client's brand.

One can understand how important such a metric could be to a client debuting a new positioning. Note that awareness wouldn't give us insight into what we really hope to measure and that a brand study focusing on awareness only wouldn't give us the metrics to prove the success of the repositioning.

Also understand that none of this would be possible without some faith in online's ability to brand. If we didn't feel strongly that the online medium can accomplish such things, we wouldn't have companies like Dynamic Logic or Factor TG.

Remember that at its core, branding is the creation of an association. There are many different ways to measure the effectiveness of creating an association, so it's important that measurement starts with a frank look at what an advertiser or agency hopes to prove with a study. It might not be simple awareness of a product or brand, so be sure to explore the notion of what can be measured with your research vendor of choice.