Report: You Know What The Problem With Online Brand Advertising Is?

What's really holding back online brand measurement? A preoccupation with direct response, a lack of creativity, and a lack of understanding about how digital works, according to new research from eMarketer.

"There are two big problems," Joe Laszlo, director of research at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, explains in a report released by eMarketer on Monday. "I'm hearing from our publisher members that there is a kind of panel fatigue among people who are asked to take online surveys that are quantifying brand impact."

"Another issue," Laszlo added, "is an assumption that the Internet is not good for branding -- there is a continued lack of awareness on the part of marketers and agencies."

According to Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Hewlett-Packard, marketers have yet to take a good look at the critical experience of user engagement. "Marketers monitor the front end and the back end so they see click-streams and commerce," Mendenhall says in the report. "The difficult part is the qualitative part in between, which is the level of engagement."

The focus on direct response causes many marketers to only look at search, and according to Atlas Institute, if marketers only look at search -- which is often the "last ad clicked" -- they are missing 94% of their engagement touchpoints.

A recent study by iProspect and Forrester Consulting showed that when Web users were exposed to a promotional ad, less than one-third -- 31% -- of them clicked on the ad itself. A plurality, however, did take some other form of action. People went on to search for the product, brand or company using a search engine; typed the Web address directly into their browser and navigated to the advertiser's site; or investigated the product, brand or company through social media.

This phenomenon, according to eMarketer, has been referred to as a "view-through conversion" rather than a click-through conversion.

Cumulative impressions of a brand build up over time online, and the last click should not be the Holy Grail for brand measurement, the report concludes. Display complements and aids search, and affects online and offline purchases. To achieve online branding success, marketers must not ignore the creative -- remember that the size of a display ad matters, and to focus on targeting and relevance.

EMarketer highlights several broad approaches as key to moving forward on the online brand measurement front.

One has to do with time spent. "Measures of advertising online should be time-based measures rather than impression-based measures," Jon Gibs, vice president, media analytics at Nielsen Online, says in the report. "Instead of buying 100 million impressions on a Web site, it would be buying X% of a person's time."

The next step, according to Geoff Ramsey, co-founder and CEO at eMarketer, "is to overlay the data that is unique to the online space and provides a digital footprint measuring how the consumer is engaged with the brand over a period of time."

7 comments about "Report: You Know What The Problem With Online Brand Advertising Is?".
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  1. Jeff Greenfield from C3 Metrics, July 7, 2009 at 8:10 a.m.

    Very true that 'last click' doesn't take into account true value of 'view-thrus' -- but if clients are not using a single tag (container tag) to hold all of their pixels (like the ones offered by Doubleclick and C3 Metrics) then they are certainly overpaying for conversions.

    We did a 3-month comparison and found the average ad network was over counting by a factor of 6.7 with the worst offender by a factor of 14.

    Read 'The Hushed Hidden Gaps of Online Media Tracking' for more details @ http://www.c3metrics.com

  2. Mike Kelly from LIN Media, July 7, 2009 at 9:18 a.m.

    I agree with Gavin and Jeff Greenfield. For years, marketers dumped billions into media that was measured by outdated methods. Now that there are immediate, real and accurate action metrics...only those metrics are considered. It's as if the industry has turned on a dime as far as new media, but continues to plod along the same way with traditional media. Marketers have to consider the value of view through...it's the only thing they had before...and seemed to work just fine for them.

  3. Tom Cunniff from Combe Incorporated, July 7, 2009 at 9:28 a.m.

    I believe there's an additional consideration that is not being discussed: a genuine psychological phenomenon known as "inattentional blindness".

    While TV is a "view" medium, interactive is a "do" medium. When we are highly task-focused online, the ads are -- in every sense -- peripheral to what we're doing. Are there cases in which we are not just ignoring the ads, but are quite literally blind to them? I think so.

    For more about this, see: http://tjcnyc.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/inattentional-blindness/

  4. Tibor Kelmen from Rogers, July 7, 2009 at 10:12 a.m.

    The sole reason people from agencies and the general advertising world are pushing to dismiss measurements of online activities to eliminate any responsibilities for their campaings. How often have you heard blaming advertising for failed results? Never. It is always the produc marketers who didn't price the widget right, or the channel folks who didn't create proper distribution etc. The fact that a useless measure such a "view-through" is considered by some is a metric for success is ridiculous. That will take us back to the digital stone-age of serving a pure impressions by the millions. And as clients we'll end up yet again understanding what Wannamaker has known for long that "half of my advertisg dollars are wasted, just don't know which half".

  5. Lee Freund from TubeMogul, July 7, 2009 at 11:08 a.m.

    A major challenge is that most agencies do not know how to use display effectively, whether branding or direct response action. In most cases, display does not fit well into the agency business model. Agencies make big $$$ building web sites, not display banners. Rich interactive banners require more thought, planning, and education on the media side as well... What do we really want to measure? ...time spent with the brand? ...a specific action? ...click through? How will the formats we recommend impact metrics?

    While Click Through certainly is a good thing, more often than not, it is a means to an end and not the marketing goal. When developed correctly (i.e. format, structure, usability, call to action) display advertising can achieve nearly any tactical marketing objective.

    Today's display creative enables any functionality of a web site to be distributed to users across the web. It provides one of the most scalable and measurable content distribution strategies available. Marketers should look at the successful distribution (over destination) strategies of video content producers - think YouTube, Hulu, Revver, Viddler, MySpace, etc - as an example.

  6. Lee Smith from Persuasive Brands, July 7, 2009 at 12:32 p.m.

    Without question brand building via online methods is among, if not the most, measurable media today. True the industry could use more focused measurement techniques--particularly in surveys.

    However, the online landscape changes daily with a constant flow of headline stories by even mainstream media involving new online companies, products, technologies, and techniques (take Twitter’s attention over the past month during the Iran crisis).

    Unfortunately, this level innovation cuts two ways. It often delivers better branding results than traditional methods at substantially more attractive ROIs.

    But the pace of innovation discourages adoption among the risk-adverse advertising "establishment" due to: 1) ongoing educational requirements (understanding the opportunities, determining how to measure, and communicating them to their manager and client) and 2) indefinite postponement as brand advertisers wait to see what's next within the online branding space -- and how it will be measured.

    Innovation and the measurement "catch-up game" within online media may, in fact, be contributing to its slow adoption rate by traditional advertisers.

  7. Warren Lee from WHL Consulting, July 7, 2009 at 1:07 p.m.

    Great discussion folks. I would like to throw out the notion of actually utilizing some of the masses of data to actually target ads, whether branding or DM. With out some form of targeting the user is, or has, become numb to advertising. Think about it, if there is no relevance in certain areas of a web page, we simply get into the habit of skipping it. Now if a clever technology company can figure out my interests, without violating my privacy, and deliver relevant ads to me, I would consider it a plus. If the ads were in my interest area, especially for recreation, I might even consider it valuable content. It should be noted that valued content is quite a shift from annoying ads that one ignores, and really does not rely on the creative but on the subject. So target relevance and see the success metrics, however you measure them, improve.

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