• by April 18, 2006

It's true that marketers are increasing spending on online media, marketing, and advertising. Digital media and marketing aren't the same hard sell they were a few years ago. In a few cases, depending on the industry, spending is approaching nearly 30 percent of a marketer's overall budget; in others, it hovers at around 4 to 6 percent.

This month, OMMA focuses on the Top 10 online advertisers, according to TNS Media Intelligence, offering a glimpse into how they spent their online dollars. During the course of our research, we found that TNS does not factor search marketing dollars into its analysis -- a major weakness, in our opinion, since search accounts for some 40 percent of the online advertising market. But we also discovered that comScore Networks and Nielsen/NetRatings, two major data sources we rely on, were also unable to account for search dollars in their rankings of the top online advertisers.

This must change. Most savvy marketers factor search marketing programs into their online media efforts. Search is a major piece of the interactive media budget, and it's time the leading research organizations account for it by whatever means possible. But that wasn't the only challenge we faced with this issue. We were amazed that our contributing writers had so much difficulty in trying to gain insight from each of the Top 10 companies about their 2005 online spending commitments and highlights from their programs. After all, the TNS data was publicly available. Beyond that, though, we were surprised that some of the companies didn't want to share their approach to online media -- their innovations and successes, as well as some of their setbacks.

This month's Cross-Media Case study is on Unilever's Dove and the brilliant Webisodes it launched with "Desperate Housewives" star Felicity Huffman. And we return to Hollywood, where, as Larry Dobrow's Markets Focus shows, online movie marketing is now de rigueur.