• by Dale Chaney , June 17, 2002

A recent bulletin at the AdRelevance website proclaims that a “majority of online ads and impressions now focus on branding.” The story goes on to say that 63 percent of all online ads are created with branding intent rather than direct marketing intent. This finding, which is from the company’s most recent online advertising research report, defies the popular—if not prevailing—notion that most advertising on the net is geared to direct market purposes. “What we’ve discovered is that most ads shoot for positioning, awareness, or feature/benefit—all with a branding intent,” says Charles Buchwalter, vice president of media research for AdRelevance.

If the AdRelevance data is accurate, it casts a whole new light on the subject of click-throughs, telling us that click-throughs aren’t—or shouldn’t be—the primary measure for much of online advertising, Buchwalter says. “Click-throughs pertain mostly to direct market ads,” he says, “not to branding ads.” By way of explaining the dramatic drop in click-through rates that have them down around one percent or less, it’s not a bad pass. But it begs for a new metric for determining whether online advertising is effective at the branding function. And that, Buchwalter says, is in the future.

AdRelevance’s conclusion that most net advertising is intended to advertise brand rather than direct market stems from their definitions and interpretations of the terms. These definitions have been applied to the 400,000-plus ads in the AdRelevance database over a three-month period, at 1,000 portal sites. The company extended the research to include the 10,000-15,000 new online ads that appeared weekly during that time, Buchwalter says.

With fine-tuning and inevitable revisions, “I have a reasonable comfort level with our definitions and taxonomy. The bottom line is that we are on the right track. We can tell who’s advertising, where they are advertising, and what they are advertising. And now, we can tell what their intention is—branding or direct marketing,” Buchwalter says.

AdRelevance refrains from calling their observation a “trend,” because they have only begun to track the intent of advertising, Buchwalter says. As they continue tracking intent, trends will emerge.

For the first time, the study also measures distribution of impressions by intent—and discovers an interesting anomaly. Even though branding-oriented ads account for a majority of all ads, they account for a proportionally lower percentage of impressions than direct marketing ads. [See chart.]

“We don’t know why this occurs,” Buchwalter says. “It could stem from placement within a portal, that is, whether they are placed on the portal’s homepage or on a specialty page. And, for that matter, we really don’t know whether it is better for a given ad to be on a homepage or a specialty page. These are things that we hope to discover in future research. Right now, what we know is that branding ads account for proportionally fewer impressions than direct marketing ads.”

Freelance writer Dale Chaney can be reached at dale_chaney@msn.com.