Meeting the Branding Challenge
Sarah Fay, President
Carat Interactive
As brand advertisers get more serious about online advertising, this is what we hear clients say: "We must stay true to the essence of our brand!" This means interactive agencies must develop interactive messaging that maintains the integrity of our clients' offline communications, and at the same time makes use of the unique aspects of the interactive medium. It also means that our primary objectives are shifting to affect brand awareness, message association, and purchase intent.
Rich media is, of course, a natural approach, as it grabs the consumer's attention without being intrusive or annoying. It also can deliver a rewarding brand experience to consumers, without requiring them to click away to another site (although they always have that option.) Another compelling aspect of rich media (particularly with technologies such as Pointroll) is the ability to communicate multiple brand attributes within the unit, based on consumers' interest to seek them out. In our experience, this capability has had a direct affect on moving purchase intent, and it has consistently resulted in above average post-view traffic to the web site - a sign that consumers have remembered information well enough to act on it after seeing the creative. Floating ads such as Eyeblaster are most effective in raising awareness and message association. They also generally result in the highest CTR's, although this metric does not always correlate with the highest conversion rates.
While rich media has obvious benefits, that should not dissuade advertisers from attempting to move branding metrics through the use of standard gif advertising. Generally, larger units (particularly Skyscrapers) are effective at lifting Message Association and Purchase Intent metrics, while banners can be successful at moving Aided Brand Awareness and Purchase Intent.
Ultimately, in order to be successful in moving branding metrics through interactive advertising, the same rules apply as to offline. Marketers are challenged to message clearly, appropriately, and in a compelling way to their target audiences. It's that simple, and that complex!
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Listen to the Data
Ethan Rapp,
Director of Interactive Marketing Sales Effectiveness Research
America Online
Not all online creatives are created equal. Once again it's the obvious.
Thirty second commercials do not all perform the same on branding metrics. Not all full page print ads perform the same either. Offline creative and copy testing is a multi-million dollar industry that addresses just this phenomenon.
Why is it news when we discover that online ads are not all created equal?
It's because online creative and copy testing is not a multi million dollar industry. Perhaps it should be.
Marketers were promised an accountable medium and thanks in large part to Dynamic Logic, the Internet is delivering, but it can't stop there. It doesn't matter how accountable a medium is if the best tools aren't used to give a campaign the best chance of success.
When click rates were the metric of accountability, we tested creative for click and conversion rate potential. (Anyone remember TestIt! from DoubleClick?…classic creative testing and it worked as expected). Now that we have expanded our definition of accountability to include branding, shouldn't we be paying as much attention to improving and optimizing creative? That's different than improving the creative unit which is entirely different, but no less important.
No one can doubt that you can brand online, and Dynamic Logic's MarketNorms tells us how effective online advertising can be. It's branding accountability like we have never seen. Through this data we know brand impact by exposure, by frequency, by industry, by site, by ad unit, by target audience, etc. You could argue that we know the impact of just about every campaign parameter except creative, the most influential.
To their further credit however, Dynamic Logic through MarketNorms does begin to help in some creative optimization by looking at effectiveness based on certain creative variables, such as logo presence and placement. If predictable changes like these can influence creative effectiveness imagine how much room there is for improvement if multiple creative were tested against each other. There is no simple formula for building effective creative. Creative needs to be tested and compared.
Online creative testing may just be a big missing piece that would take marketers success to a whole new level. That's what the data tells us.
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