Commentary

Where To Go Next In Online Ad Guidelines?

  • by , Featured Contributor, January 28, 2002
It's finally done. The IAB has finally released the Interactive Audience Campaign Measurement and Advertising Campaign Reporting and Audit Guidelines. While it wasn't like coming down off the mountain with the Ten Commandments of Internet Advertising, the guidelines made important progress on ad impression measurement and auditing, and the IAB finished a nagging piece of unfinished business that had been hanging over all of our heads for way too long. A solid first step for the new IAB leadership, I think.

Of course, the inevitable question is, “what's next?”

Now that the industry has some forward momentum, now that the endless committees and complicated groupthink gave way to results, where should the industry go next? What problems should our trade organizations and measurement organizations tackle now?

The possibilities are endless. We need more studies, more research and more education on almost every part of our business -- branding effectiveness, rich media, streaming media, iTV, wireless, instant messaging, online/offline purchase behavior. If you polled a dozen media buyers and sellers for their top 10 suggestions, you would probably generate at least another 50 areas needing immediate attention. But endless possibilities are not what we need.

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We can ill afford to lose our focus. We can ill afford to scatter our resources tackling too many initiatives at once. Fortunately, in my opinion, one problem area stands out above all of the others. One problem area -- COMPARABILITY -- needs to be dealt with immediately. We must develop standards to compare online media and its effectiveness with the other measured media. We have to know where we stand in media buyers eyes, and we have to give media sellers the tools they need to sell apples against apples and oranges against oranges. It is an essential step in making buying online advertising as easy as buying traditional, offline media.

The advertising community has a lingua franca with which it is exceedingly comfortable. The online industry would do well to adapt to it rather than insist buyers learn our insular slag. If we can talk about online advertising in terms of reach and frequency, about our audiences in terms of circulation, readership, viewership, target demographics, GRP/TRP, perhaps we can shift traditional budgets into online and make an online media investment comparable to an offline one.

This is all the more imperative because we're not likely to see new budgets and new money showing up in the hands of marketers dying to find new ways to spend it (new budgets went up in smoke with the dot-coms and the NASDAQ collapse) and, with the heavy shift of marketers into digital direct marketing (Jupiter predicts that it will pass online advertising next year), we could get left even farther behind.

How would I propose we do it?

1) Create online media standards that are fully compatible and comparable to the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) advertising effectiveness guidelines (first published in 1961 and just updated and re-released in 2001);

2) get the IAB, OPA, AAAA, ANA and MRC to participate and join together on the standards;

3) conduct objective research with a neutral and respected firm to measure and prove/disprove the effectiveness of online compared to other media with comparable metrics, and;

4) (assuming that the research proves out what we all believe to be true about online media) promote, promote, promote the results.

-- Dave Morgan is the founder and former CEO of Real Media. He is currently CEO of Tacoda Systems, formerly known as True Audience – an audience management software company.

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