• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 10, 2006

High-level ad executives speaking at a digital media summit in New York Thursday revealed that despite all the action surrounding TV over the Internet deals, a profound cultural divide still separates executives on both sides of those two media. The problem is more one of perception and communication than a fundamental clash of business models or value propositions, players from both sides agreed.

"Clearly, we've done something wrong when the way we present our numbers to advertisers and media agencies makes them feel the data is not as good--is not as reliable as when it comes from Nielsen," Trevor Kaufman, CEO of media design agency Schematic, said during the McGraw Hill summit, prodding other panelists to explain why that is often the case.

For one thing, said Mitch Oscar of Carat Digital, even Web-savvy media planners often don't know what to make of the profuse, complicated data given to them by Internet publishers--including page impressions, duration, download rates, and click-through rates to other content or advertisements. In large part, this is simply due to an inability to "translate" the numbers.

"I think, really, it's about culture--it's not about numbers," Oscar said. "When I see a campaign on Google that says an Adidas ad generated 5 million clicks that day, I don't know what that means. I don't know where to put it: I was trained that if "Desperate Housewives" does 10 million households, that's meaningful to me and I can do a cost per point. We haven't put the two plans together."

Further, Oscar said media planners may mistrust Internet numbers because "the traditional advertising agencies didn't develop their interactive planning and buying capabilities internally"--meaning they're forced to work with a wide array of varying metrics from Internet publishers. Looking forward, he asserted: "We have to figure out how to translate all these different experiences when media planners come up with their plans."

On the other side, Bart Feder of FeedRoom was openly disdainful of the "big fat lies" that network TV media planners and buyers rely on--that is, Nielsen ratings. "They're lies, and what's more, everyone knows they're lies," Feder opined.

Later, he dismissed skepticism about the Internet as cultural inertia: "There might be doubt that someone is actually looking at an ad online--that you don't know anything for sure. But they haven't known anything forever! Are you telling me the Nielsen numbers are more trustworthy than click-throughs and so on? I don't think so."

Mostly, Feder said, the miscommunication is evidence of a failure to "manage expectations." "The advertisers have to state their objectives, and they also have to accept the best practices that are used to achieve that objective. For example, if they insist on showing a pre-roll 30-second ad, and they complain that it wasn't viewed, well--no kidding, it's a badly conceived campaign in terms of the Internet."

Nonetheless, Feder was upbeat about the future: "When the people who are selling and who are buying have a certain level of sophistication about the medium, they'll succeed."

But a third panelist, Nick Troiano of Maven Networks, pointed out: "No one knows what works and doesn't work yet. When you talk about immersive campaigns, what does that really mean?" Saying Internet TV advertising is still in its "experimental" phase, Troiano cited the prevalence of pre-roll and post-roll 15- and 30-second spots as evidence of creative failure--simply translating TV advertising to the Internet. "Most models today are pre-roll and post-roll, and there's no real way to actually determine whether you're getting impact. They're certainly not doing anything with the immersive capabilities that are available, so I think it's just too early to determine what will work or not."

Finally, during the earlier panel, Carat's Oscar was willing to lay some blame at the feet of media buyers concerned with their own career marketability. Media buyers who work with television are loath to divert money to any other medium, according to Oscar, for fear or diminishing the importance of their own bailiwick: "The television buyer who is hoping to get their next job as a more important buyer in another agency doesn't want to allocate any of their funds to broadband video or wireless, simply because they become less important in the marketplace in their future. There's no incentive internally."