• by Masha Geller , September 5, 2003

If the results are positive, it will continue to push the industry in the right direction. If results are not positive, it could set the industry back to its 2002 sub-par performance. That's the feeling of the interactive advertising industry in advance of tomorrow's release of several studies of the interactive landscape at the first annual Interactive Advertising Bureau's Advertisers Forum in New York.

The IAB is hoping the above fears will prove to be unfounded, as it plans to release new IAB Cross Media Optimization Study (XMOS) results, which will show whether advertising effectiveness should be quantified across multiple media - television, magazine, radio and online - and what new learning on effective creative execution can be gleaned from the research.

This latest installment of the study, which is the IAB's ongoing bid to precisely point to the contributions of each media in the marketing mix, will be presented alongside new IAB Sponsorship Effectiveness research, and a plethora of case studies.

Also, the agenda includes such discussion topics as Integration and Allocation: How Organizations Incorporate Interactive Effectively; Adapting Offline Creative to Online; Search-spawned Innovations - Targeting through Contextual Listings; and Local Advertising Online: Innovations in Geographic Targeting.

One of the items that's sure to get pulses racing is "IAB LIVE: Proposal, Debate and Recommendation of Publisher Policy and Guidelines on the Use of POP-UPS."

The most recent installment of the XMOS, in February, focused on television, print, and online advertising campaigns from Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex Soft Pack tissues and Colgate-Palmolive's Colgate Total toothpaste that ran for six to eight weeks, and found that the optimal advertising mix provides increased brand or sales impact ranging from 10 to 15%.

One year ago, MSN and Unilever released their initial XMOS results, followed by findings from McDonalds in October 2002. The three key findings from the research are: 1) using a static budget, optimal results are achieved when online advertising is 10-15% of the marketing mix; 2) adding online advertising expands reach and coverage and 3) increasing online allocation produces better overall results by increasing the ROI.