Bringing Branding Advertising Online
I caught the last half an hour of an interesting workshop at the Always On conference titled “Harnessing Web Analytics to Your Advantage”. The discussion focused on the various web analytics - such as Omniture, WebSideStory, CoreMetrics and ClickTracks - that are available to advertisers and agencies to track the performance of their online campaigns. Because of the inherent ability to track and measure online advertising spend to very granular levels, direct marketers with hard performance metrics have been the early adopters of this form of advertising.
In this workshop, Greg Stuart, President, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), spoke about the effectiveness of brand advertising via online campaigns and the variety of analytics that are now available to measure the interaction of the online user with the brand. He said that his recommendation to advertisers is to spend as much of their dollars as they can in search. However, since search is a supply gated market with limited inventory, his advice is to combine this search advertising with display, brand advertising which can also be effectively measured online.
This theme was echoed in the afternoon session titled “How Long Will Search Keyword Advertising Dominate?” where Ron Belanger, VP, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Anand Subramanian, our CEO here at ContextWeb discussed the fact that brand advertisers have access to a lot more analytics on the performance of their online brand campaigns versus the very limited analytics for tracking the performance of TV campaigns. As advertisers and agencies get access to these web analytics we will continue to see a surge in online brand advertising campaigns such as the $20 million dollar Pioneer branding campaign launched in August 2006 and running till March 2007 through RPA: Rubin Postaer and Associates ad agency.
This is a great example where the appropriate audience for the campaign have been targeted through the type of content they enjoy (tech enthusiast sites, such as CNET, DigitalTrends.com and ElectronicHouse, and general business sites, like CNN Money, Forbes.com and Yahoo Finance). This approach can be extended to utilize contextual ad networks that have the ability to do real-time, page level targeting to place this campaign on pages about tech and general business from a much larger group of sites and thus reaching to a larger audience pool with an interest in the product.
-- Shanthi Sarkar
Sphere It