• by Tom Hespos , November 7, 2006

I am often asked how a brand should allocate its media dollars to achieve the best possible ROI. This is a topic that media planners constantly think about. Some media agencies even have proprietary technology that helps determine the appropriate media mix for a client.

One area I find somewhat lacking in attempts to address the question is, just how interactive factors into the mix. I'm not talking about how much of the media budget should be allocated to online advertising. Rather, it's a question of how much interactivity contributes to brand attributes and to product sales.

Messaging is messaging, and when prospects receive marketing messages, those messages may be successful at prompting consideration or altering specific perceptions of the brand or product. But that's only part of the picture. Increasingly, people who are considering a purchase turn not to marketing messaging, but to one another. It's that aspect of mix modeling that I believe comes up short.

Think of all that auto manufacturers have learned about consideration for cars in the past few years. Around 90 percent of Internet-connected households consult online resources before buying a car. Are these people turning to online ads for information? Not as much as they look to online opinions and experiences of other like-minded people. Review sites factor into this equation in a big way, as do independent opinions. It's clear that people need input from one another to help them make big decisions.

By no means is this behavior confined to the automobile category. You'll find it in just about every category, from consumer electronics to financial products to pharmaceuticals. While it's true that people are affected in some way by media and messaging, a lot of the purchase decision hinges on what independent opinions a customer might have access to.

Modeling might be able to provide some decent feedback on the overall media mix if opinions on products and services remained static, but the universe of online conversation rarely stays that way. It's a dynamic organism that can turn on a dime if, for instance, customer service policies change, a person or small group of people discover a flaw, or someone discovers a new use or application of the product. Perceptions are constantly changing, and messaging can do only so much when people can tune in to their peers and get real information with the marketing-speak filtered out.

This is one of the reasons why, when we get a new client, one of the critical steps in developing a plan is to poke around a bit in online forums, looking for commonalities in perception of the client's product or service. All the "buy now" messaging in the world isn't going to do a thing if, for instance, someone online just demonstrated how they can pick your bike lock using nothing more than a ballpoint pen.

Yes, models can provide some value with respect to where to spend media dollars. But they're giving an incomplete picture if they don't take into consideration what information and opinions people are sharing with one another through the Internet.