• by Ken Liebeskind , March 15, 2002

Companies running many different banner ads on different websites want to know which ones work best and are now relying on third party research firms to help them decide.

Paramark/Sunnyvale, CA collects data on banner campaigns to determine which creatives work best on all the sites they run on. "We test creatives to see which perform better, which gives clients the ability to adjust their campaigns," says Dan Shapero, Paramark's marketing manager. "They adjust the campaigns while they're occurring, in instantaneous fashion."

A recent client was Exile on Seventh, an interactive agency that used Paramark for a PeoplePC banner campaign. The company was running seven creative executions across 30 placements, which include individual sites and areas of each site. "On day one, we made the decision to show every banner on every site," Shapero says. "Then we reviewed them and started eliminating. We went from seven to four and then to two, which were outperforming the others." The process took eight days. At the end, he says, it was determined that even some of the most successful banners were burning out, so they were replaced as well.

"We wanted to figure out the most resonant message besides the lowest price point," says Joe Giannantonio, analysis director at Exile on Seventh. "Should we mention AOL and MSN since they were higher priced competitors? And there was synergy with the TV campaign, with the spokesperson's image on the banner." He says Paramark "controlled the way the banners rotated through the ad server and optimized the performance. The challenge was to show ROI and we were able to measure an impact beyond what we normally do."

ROI is an important factor here, because some think it's difficult to justify the expenditure on this kind of measurement. Today, "online advertising is so cheap it may not be worth it to measure the effectiveness," says Shar VanBoskirk, a Forrester Research analyst. "It's nice to know how online is performing, but with $5 CPMs it doesn't really matter."

She suggests Paramark change its focus, and measure both online and offline advertising. "They need to optimize all the marketing beyond creative placement to find the right media and message to hit the customer at the right point of the media buying cycle."

While VanBoskirk is somewhat critical of Paramark, Forrester praised it in a recent report, Making Marketing Measurable, calling it "a real-time online marketing optimization platform that uses customer response to improve online marketing performance."

The report claimed that marketers "base their media buys on guesses and last year's plans instead of measuring what kind of marketing works." Of course online marketers use reports from DoubleClick and other ad servers. Shapero says Paramark uses DoubleClick data, but "analyzes it with a finer level of granularity." It also acquires data DoubleClick doesn't get, such as user action beyond the click, and registrations. "We place a tag on the registration page to get that data," he says, which is something ad server data doesn't always do.

Gatorade, Coca-Cola, Intel and CNET have used Paramark in the past. Shapero says rates have nothing to do with CPMs. "They're value based deals," he says, "based on the percent of lift we deliver." This form of pricing may enable Paramark to overcome VanBoskirk's objections. If they achieve a specific lift, they may be worth the expense.