NewsLine Column: The Web – Where Do I Start?

Chairman of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Danny Meadows-Klue, explains how the IAB’s new Golden Rules of online advertising make using the web, simple, quick and effective.

For some marketers getting under the skin of online is still a challenge. They may use the web at work, be deeply involved in traditional media channel marketing, and maybe have even contribute to a banner campaign or two, but they don’t have the confidence to really push for interactive media campaigns. And that’s why their brands are missing out.

With half UK households connected, the web is a part of most of our lives and a dominant media tool in many key market segments, marketers simply can’t afford to run campaigns without an online presence.

At the IAB we’re all about making things simple. For sure you’ve heard that there are a great many things you can do online, way more than traditional media channels could even dream of, but at the same time there are some pretty solid basics. And they’ll be a great guide for producing solid, effective online marketing campaigns.

But these basics need to be built on some solid research and that’s why we teamed up with the research folk at Dynamic Logic to take a fresh look at brand effectiveness. This is a medium that allows for the regular cost effective measurement of the brand impact of campaigns and waves of research with tens of thousands of consumers have allowed us to build up a solid picture of what makes great online advertising.

We’ve distilled down dozens of campaigns, projects and research exercises into five Golden Rules that can act as a checklist for most online campaigns. And for classic marketers the good news is just how familiar these will seem. These five Golden Rules for effective online advertising that can be easily applied to marketers using almost any online advertising formats. They represent the foundations of best practice in online advertising and are both simple to use and widely supported. They are:

Larger ads work better Larger formats like the Skyscraper sizes we introduced last summer are proven to be three to six times more effective than smaller formats.

Plan frequency Increasing frequency increases effectiveness. In the early days of the internet people thought that each advert should only be seen once by a viewer and that the only point of an advert was to generate a click through to a partner’s website.

Today we’ve learned that online can be just like television or radio and that we should be building the frequency of a campaign to create stronger awareness and campaign impact. Now we know that online ad effectiveness grows with each exposure and that a campaign might have an optimal frequency of 5, 7 or more exposures.

The optimal frequency will vary between campaigns just as it does in other media but remains higher than many marketers think. The trick with online is to determine optimal frequency for your campaign using some pre-launch research and to test optimal number of exposures for each campaign as the ‘plateau’ may vary.

Target audiences Targeting increases effectiveness and smart marketers plan their campaigns by targeting the right parts of a website for their audience and get bigger returns.

There’s always a place for run of site style campaigns which work across a broad collection of website sections or channels, but online does allow a unique targeting in the advertising messaging environment. Smart marketers look for those opportunities and build long term relationships for their brands within them.

But targeting is becoming ever more sophisticated. Consider targeted inventory, but don’t target just on price, use the live research products to also target on ad effectiveness against classic advertising brand measures.

Be bold with your logo Some have called online the ‘outdoor’ media that’s indoors. This is because many of the design rules for poster advertising ring true in online. We’ve found that powerful use of the brand logo throughout an advert disproportionately raises brand awareness and message association. Consistent presence of logo doubles branding results.

For creative teams this means that when artwork is being developed the even if the commercial takes many seconds to run the logos should be in as early as possible and for as long as possible.

Cut the clutter This is a Golden Rule for all great communication. Simple artwork is more powerful and our advice is not to clutter up web artwork with too many messages, calls to action and images. Keeping things simple generates a much better brand response and with online research easy to plug into campaigns you can always pre-test some different creative to check that you really are on track.

Dynamic Logic have built up these findings through practical campaigns researched in live environments with real brand metrics being tracked. This combination of marketing theory and practice gives us a great understanding of how online should be used. They are a simple checklist that all marketers can follow to produce effective online campaigns.

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