NewsLine Column: Accountability Will Be A Key Measure Going Forward

With the latest figures from the IAB showing that internet advertising is quickly reaching maturity, Nick Sparey, consultant at Media Audits, explains that accountability is key to making online an increasingly important part of the marketing mix.

The growth in internet advertising has been well-chronicled for some time now, with the medium developing in size through the troubled times of the dotcom era to over £190 million and a share of total media in excess of 1%, making it now bigger pound-for pound than cinema advertising. To put this into perspective, commercial radio took more than twenty years to achieve a share of more than 2% of the total advertising cake, and it is now widely perceived by clients and agencies alike as being an essential part of the media mix.

Increasingly the numbers of advertisers continuing to invest regularly in the medium grows on a monthly basis, whether to generate increased brand awareness online or more specifically to attract new customers via a direct response route. Indeed, the larger-spending advertisers are now committing over £1 million to internet advertising, from a variety of sectors ranging from Finance to Travel to Cars.

Advertisers are taking advantage not only of the cheaper-than-average entry costs but also of the interactivity and creativity that the medium affords. Consumers though, have become increasingly selective in their preferences of site usage and also the advertising messages that they interact with.

So the industry has had to move on from its humble beginnings with the standard banner firmly adopted as the mainstay of a schedule and develop a new range of different creative formats and sizes. Interstitials, Superstitials and Skyscrapers, coupled with the new technologies from companies such as Eyeblaster and Tangozebra, have considerably raised the standards and possibilities with advanced rich media formats, which are having a real impact.

In addition, the ability to successfully track users beyond the banner, means that both advertisers and media agencies can now understand more fully what happens in post-click and how latent response affects advertising. This above all is beginning to help encourage clients to move away from a reliance on click-through as a robust criterion for success.

Media Audits has for some time been monitoring the growing importance of online media within the marketing mix, and the opportunities it offers clients to increase brand awareness and acquire new customers cost-effectively. This theory was recently highlighted by the latest Bellwether Survey, which not only confirms that 15% of all UK companies in 2002 allocated more than 5% of their total marketing budget to the internet, but also that it is the fastest growing medium.

The irony has not escaped us given our unique position of independence and objectivity, in that for a medium which is arguably the most accountable in terms of ROI, its relative limitations in measurement techniques, compared to more conventional media, still seem to be its undoing. Accountability, measurement and benchmarking are still at the heart of our business – it’s in our DNA. So it makes perfect sense for us to champion the cause for this growing medium, but specifically driven by our clients. But above all it’s because of these same clients’ desire to understand and determine the full effect of an integrated multi-media campaign and within this what online media can add to the overall communications strategy, that we are launching an online evaluation and consultancy service in the UK in the summer of 2003.

Our service will primarily be to evaluate clients’ online planning and buying performance against a pool of other advertisers, with consideration to a number of key areas such as:

Agency remuneration
Overall planning and buying effectiveness and comparison
Cost analysis
Targeting issues
Competitive activity
Website consultancy
Buying model analysis
Media owner negotiations
Creative formats
Tracking, latent response and post-click conversion analysis

We will be investing heavily in bespoke proprietary software to run alongside our own internal systems that currently transcend the more traditional media, and a system that will therefore run independently of all current third-party ad serving offerings in the market. We will also be endeavouring to contextualise for advertisers how online media can work within a truly integrated media solution, whether it be via a branding exercise campaign or more direct response-led campaign. In this way we will also be covering all possible buying models and variants, with a view to reporting on specific actions and objectives, and how optimisation affected the campaign.

The old analogy of 80% of the monies going to 20% of the sites will mean that we will ourselves make sure that fundamentally the pool data must be robust to be valid, hence our honesty on a sufficient sample size as we will be segmenting clients’ activity according to where they placed their activity. Finally, we will also primarily be focusing on the UK market, but if successful will offer the service to pan-European clients across our network of offices.

If you would like to respond or make further comment on this or any other NewsLine article, please email [email protected]