• by Jim Meskauskas , January 16, 2003

Every client I’ve ever worked with has always had a lofty sense of themselves as a potential brand force. Every one of them wanted to say “something” about who they are and who they want their prospects and consumers to think they are. Even in the early days of online advertising with companies that were still waiting for their CEOs to graduate from high school, the idea of being a brand – as a grand concept in the public’s mind – was the call of the day.

Big dreams of being an indispensable feature of an individual’s life, a facet of their character, was what every new company at the time aspired to. And why not, since the largest companies in the world count among them brands that have become emotional experiences for their consumers.

What new company wouldn’t have this level of aspiration? After all, as I like to say, aim for the highest point so that way, even if you miss, you still end up pretty close to the top.

And so, when these clients started their ad campaigns online, their visions of themselves were as branders.

Traditional general market advertisers, too, have made their way online thinking of themselves first and foremost as branding advertisers, engaged in a rhetorical discourse with the public, persuading that public to “feel” a certain way about the product or service.

Funny thing is, the second any of these clients received the post-buy report from their first online advertising campaign, they all instantly turn into direct response marketers.

They all look at metrics that have never mattered before when considering the effects of the advertising their company commits. Clicks, cost-per-visit, number of pages viewed… these are all ways of gauging the impact of one’s advertising that are representative of direct marketing disciplines, not branding.

This isn’t to say that online as a media does not conduct branding, and conduct it efficiently, but there is no doubt that the means by which clients judge their efforts online are tools taken from a realm that traditionally has been viewed with some disdain.

Direct response marketing has always been seen as the déclassé, swarthy, velvet-paintings-of-crying-Elvis type activity by Brandinista VPs of Marketing. But, look at them start matching up ad impressions with user action the second they get their hands on that post-buy. They rabidly comb through data like a truffle hound. However, talk to them before you launch a campaign about whether or not their objectives are DR or branding and they look at you like you just passed gas.

OF COURSE they want to increase awareness and brand perception. They don’t want to have anything to do with Direct Response and they suggest that if you use that word again in their presence, they will have you exiled to St. Helena. Ask them if they have an efficiency objective or a volumetric objective, they’ll have you exiled to the leper colony of Molokai.

It is important for advertisers to realize that there is no reason why they can’t speak the language of one discipline while being engaged in another, especially when the tools they use to interpret that engagement are borrowed from that other discipline.

An advertiser can still desire to be a branding force but have acquisition goals when committing their online advertising. It is okay to use words like “response” and “acquisitions” and “database” in reference to your online activities even if you fancy yourself a brand marketer. Because every marketer, whether a “brand force” or not, has as their goal getting response to advertising, acquiring customers, and building a database to help improve their marketing efforts.

The sooner clients get comfortable with the fact that there really aren’t two separate worlds here – one, a clean shiny land of branding versus a dank and plastic-covered room of direct response – but just one world that has ready to hand at its disposal a variety of means to accomplish the same or similar goals, the sooner every one can be clear about what we are all doing and what we need to do.