• by Bill Wise , December 4, 2006

Last week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau unleashed a new campaign to push online media. As online still takes only 5.8% of all current media spend, the campaign--complete with the fabulous slogan  "Media More Engaging"--is entirely welcome. But I also think that the campaign, which focuses on how online media's targeting and metrics allow for better engagement, sells online media short. Because engagement is really only part of the story.

Online isn't just powerful because it's more engaging (which it is). Online is powerful because it allows you to really measure conversions and ROI. And you can apply those numbers to bring your conversions and ROI up further. Few offline channels can match that online capability--which makes online far more than a uniquely powerful engagement provider. It makes online a better medium for building conversions and returns. And focusing on returns, I think, is a far more powerful value proposition than just engagement.

So why would the IAB turn to engagement? I think it's because the IAB isn't really looking at online media as something truly new and disruptive. It's looking at online media as the next stage in an evolution of that offline media began. And I think a lot of the reason for that is that the IAB isn't thinking hard enough about search.

Let's start with the concept of engagement itself, and the IAB's use of it. As an article in MediaDailyNewspointed out, the IAB's engagement angle was borrowed from offline media: engagement is a key selling point, for example, for the magazine industry, and also for television. But offline media talk about engagement is actually rooted in offline's most fundamental shortcoming.

Let me explain. The idea of engagement as a value proposition is that the more people like your ad, the more likely they are to buy your product. And there's certainly a good deal of logic behind that argument; but there's also a heavy dose of circular thinking at play there, too. That's because the engagement argument shifts the focus of your advertising away from your business, and puts the entire emphasis on the ad itself. And by putting ads first, businesses don't seem to be such a strong selling point.

Of course, in offline media, focusing on ads over businesses is the only real option there is. Since offline ads live in a different sphere than the businesses they sell, they immediately lose contact with the consumers they're reaching out t. There's a world of distance between a billboard and a car dealership, or a TV ad and a clothing store. That distance, combined with a lack of technology, makes it very hard for offline advertising to keep track of the customers it reaches. The only thing offline advertisers can truly know about isn't how an ad impacted a business's bottom line--it's the items centered around the ad itself, which is the only piece of the puzzle directly under the advertiser's control.

But in the online world, that kind of disconnect isn't there. Ads and businesses are highly intertwined. Ad viewers jump from ads to businesses to conversions in a matter of minutes; what's more, Internet technology allows powerful tracking of those conversions. And you can use that tracking information to develop online strategies that earn you more money. And so online media shouldn't be focused on engagement, which is the best that offline has to offer. Online should be focused on ROI, which is what online media offers--and what businesses want.

What's getting the message confused? The IAB seems to be focusing on the online channels that are online adaptations of offline channels, like video and display. And it's overlooking the single channel that's taken the biggest chunk of online spend (40%), and which was actually bornon the Internet itself: the medium of search.

You certainly can use search to develop engagement, and as a powerful branding tool. But the purpose of the search ad itself (I mean the search creative) isn't generally to get people to dwell on the creative. It's to shuttle potential customers from search engines to your business, and to lead them to conversions. That's not an offline-style engagement focus, it's an online ROI focus. That's something quintessentially online--and a point the IAB needs to consider in selling online advertising.

But the IAB doesn't seem to be looking to search. You can see that clearly when you look at the IAB's "Media More Engaging" page. First, check out the list of online media on the left of the screen: digital and display are on top; search is at the bottom, and appears below-the-fold on my laptop. Perhaps more tellingly, the page itself is entirely Flash-based. And as any search marketer can tell you, Flash is completely unreadable to the search engines.