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Interview – Charlie Dobres, Andrew Walmsley and Craig Wilkie, founding partners – i-level

Interview – Charlie Dobres, Andrew Walmsley and Craig Wilkie, founding partners – i-level

If there is one thing that everyone can currently agree on, it’s that use of the internet is growing at a staggering rate. Not only are more and more people using the Net for information and entertainment, but more and more companies are beginning to use websites to sell their goods and services online. Amazon.com, the US-based online bookstore has seen its share price soar in recent months mainly due to the excitement that currently surrounds the internet. Stock in many other companies that have developed an online presence has risen similarly.

As the distinctions between the world wide web and television begin to blur, with the onset of digital TV, so the case for using the Net effectively as a business and advertising medium becomes even greater. Whilst UK media owners, agencies and advertisers are gradually starting to realise this, the medium is still in its early stages: the internet didn’t really start to get off the ground in a big way until around 1995 in Britain.

Charlie Dobres, Craig Wilkie and Andrew Walmsley (left to right in photo), founders of the new media independent, i-level, have been involved in the internet from these early days. Dobres, CEO of i-level, has spent the last eighteen months as the general secretary of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), UK. He steps down from that post this week to concentrate on i-level. In 1996 he set up Lowe Digital, the new media department of the Lowe & Partners network of agencies.

Andrew Walmsley, i-level’s chairman, founded and chairs the Digital Marketing Group (DMG), an industry body of 19 of the country’s top 20 agencies. Before leaving last month to start i-level, Walmsley was head of digital media at Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Prior to working in interactive media, Walmsley also gained experience of traditional media from his five years at BMP and latterly BBH.

Craig Wilkie, creative director at i-level, was a founder member of the Guardian‘s New Media Lab and launched the paper’s commercial online activities, with a specific focus on revenue generation and joint ventures through online sponsorships.

The overriding ethos behind i-level, according to Dobres, is to offer media agencies a complementary service to help the agencies and their clients make the most of the internet in their advertising campaigns. i-level is offering agencies, and advertisers, the trio’s expertise in planning, buying and analysing online advertising campaigns. One of the key strengths of the i-level team, according to Dobres, is that it brings together experience from different backgrounds. “We have a perfect hybrid between understanding traditional communications and understanding, and being practitioners of new media communication as well,” he says.

The business plan for i-level has been put together over the last six months, during which time Dobres, Walmsley and Wilkie discussed with a number of top UK agencies the company’s ideas and the agencies’ and advertisers’ needs. Agencies are currently briefing their clients on i-level’s involvement. At launch, on 19 April, i-level will have over £4 million of billings, which i-level estimates to be around 10% of the current UK market for online advertising. The company has also already secured the interest of two of “London’s biggest media agencies”, according to Walmsley.

Further detail’s of i-level’s initial business will be announced shortly, although Dobres confirmed that most of this business is made up from clients spending significant amounts of money on their online campaign, with budgets of a million pounds and higher. These businesses, as opposed to those with online budgets of five to ten thousand pounds, are the ones that view the internet as much more than just an ‘add-on’ medium, says Dobres.

i-level will work alongside media agencies, and in some cases directly with the advertisers themselves, to offer online planning, buying and analysis expertise. The company believes that agencies can use i-level in a way that does not threaten to undercut their own business and that this is far cheaper than setting up a new media department within the agency itself. As internet advertising only accounts for a small fraction of total UK ad spend at present, most agencies will be reluctant to create a department dedicated to online planning and buying. Indeed, even the most optimistic of targets for 2003 only puts UK online ad expenditure at £500 million, 3.6% of the total display market.

i-level hopes to expand agencies’ knowledge of the market through its work, rather than keep the processes and systems invisible to the agency. Walmsley is confident that i-level is able to offer media agencies a breadth of experience which would be very difficult for agencies to generate in-house in a short period of time. “We will have a breadth of experience against lots of different clients and campaigns which we can bring to bear on each new piece of business that comes in our door,” he says.

There is an increasing demand from advertisers to have their business utilise the Net. Dobres describes advertisers’ current relationship with online advertising as one of frustration. Advertisers are increasingly aware, he says, of the number of people going online and the possibilities that the internet holds for advertising and business in a wider sense: “Advertisers are now pretty switched on. They see 20% of the adult population of the UK now regularly online; they see the US doing innovative things and spending more money on campaigns. Basically, they see the business imperative of being online but they are frustrated because they can’t yet find the practitioners to actualise that.”

A key aspect of i-level’s pitch is the skill of interpreting the knowledge of traditional media and of brands and strategy and applying this knowledge to the online environment. Being online is not simply advertising or marketing, according to Dobres, it is more about taking a part of a business and putting it on the internet. “It is distribution, it’s immediate, it’s marketing, it’s the pricing, it’s all aspects of the business,” he says.

The key factor in bringing insight to i-level lies in recruiting the right people – something that its founder members admit has been difficult to do. After having discussions with key staff from a number of agencies and media owners, Walmsley says that the list of suitable people – with the experience, ability and passion required – was very short indeed. Despite this, the i-level team is expected to be seven-strong by the end of this month.

Backing up the insight which key people can bring, will be a set of systems developed by Dobres and Walmsley over the past few months. Along with systems designed specifically for the process of planning and tracking online campaigns, i-level has also developed two new measurements, or metrics, for analysing the traffic (users) which moves through a website. Currently advertisers, planners, buyers and new media owners alike are all struggling to develop a universal system of measurement to monitor who is using a website, how they are using it and for how long.

So far, most measurement has centred on page impressions, click-throughs and the number crunching of raw web logging data. Log files are huge, prone to duplication and easily manipulated and page impressions give little indication of whether a user is actually reading all the information on the page. i-level was recently responsible, through Dobres, for the hugely successful EasyJet online campaign. The results from this showed that those sites which generated the highest number of click-throughs were not necessarily the same sites that generated the greatest return on investment for EasyJet. For i-level, the key to ensuring the effectiveness of an online campaign is relevancy: ads must be placed amongst the right audiences and not simply on the most-used websites, as is happening at present, and the EasyJet campaign illustrates why.

For this reason i-level is keen to offer measurements which move beyond just click-throughs, to those which demonstrate a tangible business incentive for having the ad placed where it is – in EasyJet’s case, the sale of a flight. “If whoever’s doing the planning and buying for you is only measuring click-through then you’ve got a problem. Because if that’s how you’re going to judge the effects of your campaign and future activity, then you’re missing something,” says Dobres. “Click-through may be an appropriate metric if you’re a publisher and you’re trying to generate traffic to your website; if you’re selling something online as EasyJet are, you don’t care how many people click on your ad, you want to know how many bums you get on seats,” adds Walmsley.

Continental Research’s 1998/9 Internet Report found that only 59% of regular internet users had ever clicked on a banner advertisement. “Add avoidance is an issue in all media and in an interactive medium like the internet it’s an even bigger issue because people are typically active consumers rather than passive. That makes it even more important that you’re smart about where you place your advertising and how you conduct it, because people are more able to avoid you,” says Walmsley.

Craig Wilkie’s role, as creative director, is to ensure that campaigns are planned creatively to minimise this avoidance and generate the most interest possible. “Sixty per cent of the business currently goes to the top ten sites,” he says. Wilkie is keen to develop campaigns that move away from the straight banner ad; sponsorship is an area which he believes should be used by advertisers much more on the internet. He previously worked on the European-wide eurosoccer.com and shiftcontrol online sponsorship deals. “What we don’t want to be, and what we’re not going to be, is just another banner-buying shop. We’ve got to bring more value and more smartness – Craig’s role is a catalyst to stimulate creative thinking,” adds Walmsley.

i-level feels that there are currently no direct competitors to the service it will offer to media agencies and advertisers. Its ethos of a complementary, non-competitive relationship with agencies and the systems and insight gained from the trio’s background in new media should stand i-level in good stead. Perhaps the best illustration of the media independent’s offering is summed up by Dobres’ rather grand claim: “It’s the advertiser’s old adage,” he says, “that ‘50% of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.’ Well, we know which half.”

Interviewer: Scott Billings

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