• by Richard Hopple , July 18, 2002

Earlier this week, I attended the annual AAAA/ANA marketing conference in New York City. For the most part I thought it was a pretty good affair and generally well attended.

But I was struck by the presentation given by Gregory Herbold from IRI who presented the results of a yearlong study on the effects of frequency in online advertising across about 10 categories of advertisers.

What was striking to me was when you cut through all the statistics, charts and comparisons between brands, the abundantly clear conclusions were pretty simple, straightforward and obvious. They were:

1. More advertising works better than less advertising - although there is a point of diminishing return.
2. Brands in highly responsive categories tend to respond to more advertising better than those in less responsive categories; and
3. The quality and content of the ads themselves makes a very big difference in the results.

This is Advertising 101. Every marketer knows this and every agency account executive that didn’t learn it in business school picks it up within his or her first week on the job.

My intent here is not to disparage the study but it is fascinating (and frustrating) to me that major advertisers like Lever and Pfizer have so little confidence in the medium that they feel compelled to spend money testing the basic tenets of advertising to see if they apply to the Internet.

Of course they apply to the Internet. They apply everywhere else. Why should there be any reason to believe that they wouldn’t apply here.

The Industry did this to itself. For years it told advertisers that it was different…vastly different: that the old rules didn’t apply here and that advertisers (the ones with the huge experience bases and budgets to match) who didn’t understand didn’t get it. They guys that did get it were the now gone dot coms and the greedy ignorant (and poorer) venture groups.

And now, unfortunately, the industry that has confused, mislead and deceived advertisers, has to prove that it’s not different in the most fundamental ways. This is a painful, time-consuming and expensive process. And studies like this, while helpful, won’t get us there any time soon. Lever said that it has made the Internet an integral part of its advertising budgeting process, but I don’t think anyone has seen any big increase in spending on their part; and Pfizer said they essentially look at it on a case by case basis.

What we need is research led by the industry (the IAB would be a good place to start) that compares the relative effectiveness of spending on the Internet versus spending the same amount on the media historically used to build a business. We are never going to undo the years of confusion and the current skepticism without that kind of data and it will take advertisers too many years and cost publishers too much money in potential business lost to let it happen on its own.

Come on. There needs to be some leadership and vision here. We’ll take the lead. Who wants to help?

Richard Hopple is CEO of Unicast.