Once again, the roundtable discussions were extremely valuable to the audience and a significant number of ideas were shared amongst the attendess. Here is a recap of the Branding and Online
roundtables.
eCommerce/Lead Gen Roundtable: Steve Jacoby of Converge Direct led this roundtable and gathered the following key takeaways from the group:
- Currently, it's difficult
putting a dollar value on the pre-click conversions so it fits within your P&L? There are no good models that exist today. Hopefully in time, more data will shed light.
- In the
future, marketers will look across media channels and attribute a weight to the “assisted†conversions. Technology solutions must be developed to measure this, but the group wasn't sure
where the technology will come from - publishers? tool providers? analytics?
- The group all agreed (and some are executing) that expansion of LTV (life time value) range enables greater
visibility to ROI. However, quantifying LTV is very tough because the data lives in multiple silos (search tracking, CRM, ad tracking, analytics, etc).
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Brand
Advertiser Roundtable: Joshua Palau, Vice President SEO, Razorfish led this roundtable. Key takeaways:
Using Search / Social for brand building was a large discussion point for the group.
Ideas: - Use social as a way to build brand by building community and handling conflict resolution. - When you go ahead with this, you need to be the knowledge leader in your space so that you can
align your brand as the leader. - Unfortunately, sites like Second Life haven’t really worked in the past.
Some Best Practices: - Don’t wait too long to jump into the low
cost options â€" but have some strategy around where are you going? Answer the question - Why are you there in the first place? - Make sure your agencies are talking (crazy to think
it’s not happening, but it’s not). - Get the critical message out that you want in the marketplace.
Opportunities: - Leverage a plan for “secondary search
engines.†- Be on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook because your people search those sites. - There is also a link opportunity for these.
There were a lots of other conversations around
tracking these efforts and people doing social more for the search benefit, rather than wanting to do it or needing to do it for the brand.
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Ad Supported Media/Portal
Roundtable: Julie Greenhouse, VP of Product Sales, Platform A led this roundtable. Key takeaways:
- Surprisingly, contexual buys on the search engines is light. There needs to be growth in
search advertising opportunities to include contextual buys through education and evangelism. - Advertisers need better products, reporting, and tools to support efficiency of display and content.
Consolidated reporting is missing as well. - A greater understanding of the search & display correlation is needed. The marketers need help to prove the ROI of display buys.