Just an Online Minute... Talking to Ourselves

by Masha Geller, May 19, 2003, 12:00 AM

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I spent Friday at the IAB Leadership Forum in New York and aside from being wowed by the event, the attendance and the overall "we're a legitimate medium now, not just a bunch of overly excited entrepreneurs" atmosphere, I spent the day talking with various people about the IAB's Cross Media Optimization Study and what it really means for the industry. Specifically, is anyone really paying attention?

The IAB has spent a whole lot of time and resources and thanks to Rex Briggs has come up with a prescription for majors marketers to spend anywhere from 10 to 15% of their media budgets online for best results. As a result, McDonald's recently announced that they would be increasing their online spending to 10%. At the time, a precious few, myself included, quietly speculated that the announcement was just a clever ploy to scare TV networks into lowering their upfront prices, and now that some time has passed, I'm beginning to wander if that's really the case.

Once the upfront is over and commitments are signed, we'll know for sure, but to this skeptic it looks like the online industry is still preaching cross media integration to itself and the rest of the world is telling us little white lies to make us feel a little better. Case in point: someone at the conference asked a very senior McDonalds official a rather pointed question about the company's specific online spending plans only to get a "we're working on leveraging that and we're on the right track" type of answer.

I fully understand that it takes a lot of time to convince big traditional advertisers to pay attention to the XMOS, which I do think is the best initiative the IAB has ever undertaken, but if I were sitting on a traditional-only media budget and the XMOS study in hand, I'd move a lot quicker than all the study participants have to date (except ING, which went into the study already spending more than 15% online.)

Then again, Rome wasn't built in a day...

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