• by R.J. Lewis , December 1, 2008

It is easy to get drawn into fear and panic in these times of economic turmoil. Marketers at many companies will feel pressure to cut their advertising and marketing budgets due to the uncertainty of the economic environment. Don't.

These markets represent a great opportunity. Instead of cutting, focus your budget with laser precision and increase share-of-voice. Like a long-term investor, the savvy marketer sees opportunity in chaos, and realizes that their marketing dollar today goes further when there is less competition vying for media placements.

Savvy investors buy when everyone else is selling. The savvy marketer realizes that many of her competitors are cutting marketing budgets in this economic cycle--and that her marketing dollars today buy more than they did yesterday. In essence, like stocks, marketing opportunities are "on sale." Weak markets present excellent opportunities for buyers to negotiate better deals through price, contract terms, and extracting added value. Aggressive marketing when your competitors are cutting their budgets yields a higher relative share of voice and a great opportunity for brand-building in a less cluttered environment.

Stay Focused

Vertical online advertising networks are an aggregate collection of Web sites of similar interests. The aggregation of these Web sites, and their advertising opportunities, benefit both the advertiser and the Web site publisher. Both parties benefit through network scale, centralized sales and ad delivery systems, shared services and various applied technologies. This column examines these factors in the context of reach and frequency.

As way of example, let's say a financial services marketer wants to purchase targeted contextual inventory on pages about mutual funds. Some large- and medium-sized Web sites will offer significant reach independently. But since mutual funds are a relatively niche area, even large and medium-sized sites may have insufficient traffic to those specific content pages to make a media buy either attractive or practical.

For these and thousands of other smaller sites making up the long tail of the Internet, a vertical online advertising network aggregates sparsely visited, highly contextual pages for the media buyer with similar pages on hundreds of other sites--forming a highly targeted "channel" of the marketer's desired target audience.

Through a media buy with a vertical network, the marketer is able to quickly execute and optimize on a campaign with significant quality reach, and the publisher is able to participate in a campaign which-- without the network--they would not be able. Both the advertiser and the publisher benefit.

As this highly targeted campaign evolves, through performance data the network collects and reports to the advertiser, an optimal frequency of ad delivery may be determined. Let's say the optimal frequency of this campaign is determined to be three ad impressions per month--this is the level where either click-through is maximized or back-end performance such as customer orders are yielding the greatest return on investment. At this point, again both the publisher and the advertiser benefit.

By applying a frequency cap of three impressions per month across the mutual fund content of the network, the advertiser is maximizing the return on their marketing dollars and the publisher is not only winning a long-term sustainable advertiser, but is again participating in a campaign they would not otherwise have sold.

Even though the publisher, acting alone, may have been able to establish a frequency cap on their site, they would not have been able to avoid the duplication of the advertisers' exposures on other sites within the channel--thus the benefit to the advertiser would not be nearly as great. Through participation in the network, the performance ROI is higher than through participation on an individual site where duplication with other elements of the media plan occurs.

Vertical networks offer reach, through the aggregation of highly targeted audiences. Vertical networks also offer frequency of exposure, and the optimization of frequency, to maximize the return on advertising spend. Savvy marketers take advantage of opportunities presented in a weak economy to capitalize on improved share-of-voice, a better position of negotiation and a stronger marketing dollar. Vertical online advertising networks all marketers to focus their advertising spend on achieving significant reach to only core target customers with an optimal frequency. See you online.