Morgan Stanley’s March Internet Trends Report is a must view for anyone interested in the impact that social media is having on the Internet as a whole and online marketing in particular. Of particular note, are the comments relating to the need for greater measureability and transparency.
I read this article from Monday’s NYT with great interest. It describes the problem that we’re solving at Reach Machines. Advertisers are realizing the blunt instrument of the portal buy is inefficient and are increasingly turning to more nuanced and complex media plans to deliver the kinds of returns their customers demand. Today, the best method for managing more complex campaigns is to lean on advertising networks to shoulder the administrative load for buying, placing, and tracking ads across relevant sites. They also do the work of finding clusters of sites in particular verticals that offer the content and context the advertiser is seeking with which to engage with her audience.
While this is certainly a step in the right direction, we believe that as online advertising becomes more standards-based and a small number of ad serving platforms establish dominance, the need for ad networks as they currently exist will diminish. Why be limited by a network to a choice of a few hundred sites (if that) across the entire Web, when there are potentially thousands of highly relevant and potentially productive sites on which to advertise?
In the place of today’s ad networks will be more or less open exchanges that allow publishers and advertisers to buy and sell online advertising inventory in a much more efficient and transparent way than what is currently possible today. There is too much opacity and inefficiency in the online ad market that is in so many areas technologically sophisticated and performance oriented for this outcome to not be realized. This trend is starting to accelerate as evidenced by the emergence and subsequent acquisition of online ad exchanges (see Doubleclick, RightMedia, AdECN, etc.).
What’s inhibiting the emergence of the exchange model is the lack of metrics, tools, and capabilities that both publishers and advertisers need to value and manage spend through these marketplaces. Metrics are required to value advertising inventory on an advertiser-by-advertiser basis, the tools need to be in place to track and monitor fluctuations in value and available inventory over time, and organizational capabilities need to be developed to manage the information, analysis, and transactions that make such a system work.
While not solely focused on the exchange model of online advertising buying, we’re building Reach Machines out of the belief that flexibility, transparency, openness, and standards are good for the online advertising industry. While ad networks represent progress (in some cases), marketers will demand more and more online advertising solutions that help them find online advertising opportunities wherever they exist on the Web and enable marketers to pursue them. Ad exchanges combined with open ad serving platforms and next generation planning and buying tools will enable online marketers and agencies to do just that.
The IAB recently published a report on how UGC and social media are transforming the digital experience on the Web. Some of it is a rehash of concepts and insights well familiar to many of the people who are involved in the space.
It’s good to see the IAB funding studies like this as we believe UGC and social media are two major forces that are driving the evolution of advertising away from hard-to-justify buys “of time/space on fixed media in controlled contexts” and toward much more targeted, engaging, and measureable campaigns.
BRANDWEEK’s Betsy Cummings posted this article on the new gold standard in interactive brand marketing measurement: engagement. The case cited in the piece involves a P&G campaign to promote the company’s Aussie shampoo brand.
After reading the article, I went to the following sites to see how much of this engagement had spilled out into the Web at large and what I found was pretty telling. Aside from the text ads purchased by online retailers and comparison shopping sites targeting the phrase “aussie shampoo”, I found very few mentions of the brand and/or links to the brand’s website:
delicious - 0 bookmarks for “aussie shampoo”
S.U. - nothing
YouTube - several aussie shampoo commercials from months/years ago but nothing relating to the promotion
Google Search - a search for “aussie shampoo” yielded a link to http://www.aussiehair.com in the top spot (good) but then I spotted a tiny link at the bottom of the page that directed me to the US site: http://www.aussie.com/us/which presumably is where the most value to which a US-based online promotion should accrue (bad)
Google Trends - Not enough volume to produce a graph
Bloglines - Nothing relating to the promotion and little relating to the brand
Technorati - Nothing relating to the promotion and little relating to the brand
Facebook - Nothing relating to the promotion and little relating to the brand
MySpace - Nothing relating to the promotion or the brand
I stopped there.
The point of this exercise was to see if this promotion really drove meaningful, lasting, accretive value for the brand in any discernible way and it’s not clear that it did. My guess is this is because they used economic incentives to drive the activity (sweepstakes and rewards) which meant the “viral” activity cited in the article was largely contained to the promotion platform itself and was not accretive to the brand beyond the term of the campaign.
The emerging trend toward incorporating “engagement” into the set of key metrics against which campaign effectiveness is measured is undeniable and understandable. Brand marketers want a way to measure the true lasting impact of their marketing dollars on consumer awareness and purchase intent. The time and effort consumers spend interacting with a brand online are certainly good data points to assess the value of a brand marketing campaign. However, when economic incentives are introduced into the mix, the reliability of engagement should be heavily discounted.
A more objective, repeatable, and reliable way of assessing brand engagement on the Web is to go to where consumer already are, measure the reach and creation frequency of the content (mentions, links, etc.) that is intrinsically valuable to the brand, and then develop campaigns that stimulate and accelerate the engagement of users that target the places on the Web where they’re likely to be. While it’s no easy task to do this, through the use of our technology we’re finding that this more distributed approach to brand marketing on the Web is far more effective at driving marketing ROI and creating lasting brand awarenes.
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