Saturday
Consumers Cite Internet and Direct Mail as More Influential
STUDY: TV ADS DON'T SELL CARS
TV advertising has a low impact on consumers' car buying decisions, according to a new market study. The findings are significant because, as a group, automotive marketers are the largest purchasers of advertising and skew heavily toward TV advertising.Word-of-mouth
"We think manufacturers and their dealers are wasting money on broad-based TV advertising instead of a direct-marketing approach," said Mike Wujciak, a vice president who oversees Cap Gemini's auto practice. While he's not suggesting carmakers entirely ditch their TV ad budgets, he said "maybe they should re-evaluate the media mix, because TV is such a big part of their budgets."
Automakers and their dealers, the top spending advertising category, spent $18.4 billion last year in measured media, according to TNS Media Intelligence/CMR.
Recommends online ads
Mr. Wujciak recommends the industry do more online ad campaigns, which can be put together faster, within 13 weeks, compared to 36 weeks for a TV blitz. Online ads are quicker to analyze for results than other mediums, he said.Jim Sanfilippo, executive vice president of Omnicom Group's auto consultancy AMCI and former vice president for marketing of Kia Motors America, begs to differ with the results. "TV absolutely produces traffics for dealers," he said, noting that TV gets robust revenue from the auto industry "because it works."
TV quickly extends reach to consumers, said Mike Palmgren, media account director on BMW of North America at Publicis Groupe's Optimedia International, New York. He said BMW uses TV for awareness as part of its media mix. "If you're not aware of a product, how would you know where to research it on the Web?"
Magazine ads
TV auto ads also provide quality shots of vehicles and can show off their performance, something the Internet and two-dimensional ads can't do, he said. "On TV, you can see the light dancing on the sides of the car." Print ads are important too because readers of certain magazines tend to be influential and more details about the car or truck can be provided.Rob Schwartz, executive creative director in Nissan North America's account at Omnicom's TBWA/Chiat/Day, Playa del Rey, compared TV ads to "a little piece of candy. TV is a thought-starter medium," he said. Then consumers can go online for more details, he added.
Targeting Good Behavior
To be six again
My son just completed his first 30 days of first grade and came home with a report card and behavior chart, both stellar. (I'm a proud dad.) While his grades were great, I sense that now in his school acclimation process, the behavior chart is a tad more important. What could be more distracting to a six-year-old boy than to be in the same room with 25 other boys and girls? If he's exhibiting good behavior, he must be paying attention to the teacher (we hope). To track his progress, the teacher places a smiley face on each day of the calendar with good behavior. Nothing like a month full of smiles!Let's dive into behavioral targeting, a topic receiving a lot of press lately in light of announcements from wsj.com and NYTimes.com. Most people think behavioral targeting involves tracking user behavior, then dynamically leveraging the knowledge to serve relevant messaging. I think of it from the customer perspective; how can I reward a potential or current customer with more relevant information, as indicated by their implied or expressed behavior? Or, how can we marketers hand out a few smiley faces? :) (Couldn't resist!)
You're tracking my what?
Before the privacy hairs stand up on the back your neck, relax. We're talking about data collected anonymously and in aggregate, after someone has created a specific, expressed relationship with a site (through a registration process, for example). No Big Brother here.How does it work?
Say a user cruises through several MSN pages. She checks recent college football scores, then hops over to travel to research hotel specials and flight schedules. Then she clicks to monitor her company's stock and glance at this week's East coast weather. That's your average user session. Perhaps she repeats this a couple days in a row, or over a couple weekends.If you were a supplier of airline travel, you'd want to ensure your ad shows up in the airline travel section so the message is contextually relevant, right? But since you've enabled behavioral targeting criteria, you can also hit that same user with an airline ad while she's in other MSN content sections because her implied behavior indicates she may be interested in a weekend trip to a college game in sunny Florida (if her brokerage account is looking up, that is).
This might sound far-fetched, but stay with me.
What's old is new again
Many top publishers are getting serious about behavioral targeting, but one property has done it for years: Yahoo! Once called "fusion marketing" (which earned the nickname "con-fusion marketing"), Yahoo! has turned its wealth of user data into a tool to strategically optimize less-requested inventory, maximizing its ability to generate revenue (see the company's recent buff earnings report).The five ways Yahoo! behaviorally targets users
Keyword Search User types in a specific product, say "roller blades." For the next hour, you can serve creative for the new Aero 9 model skates no matter where the user is within Yahoo's network.Page View That same person happens to use Yahoo!'s directory to drill down to street sports or related content categories. They check out several pages related to skating. Based on that activity, you create a trigger to serve additional Aero 9 ads as they access other content.
Ad Clicks If our user interacts with ads matching your product's category, you can use the activity to serve your message on a future page view. This isn't Gator-ish. We aren't hijacking anyone's site or page view. We use expressed behavior to trigger the ad server to queue your creative on the next page. Think of it as "sequentially relevant ad serving."
Transactional activity Skater girl decides she'll hop a plane to this weekend's game in Florida. She'd love to cruise the boardwalk on her blades. First, find a cheap airfare. After she books that low fare, your targeting criteria kick in. You serve ads for southern Florida hotel specials, as we know from the transactional activity she booked a Miami flight. More options: Not only can you target her after the transaction, you can use her shopping and comparison activities even before the flight's booked. Her flight schedule look-up activity indicates our user is checking out Miami. Why not offer a package deal for air and hotel at one nifty price?
Category activity Yahoo!'s behavioral targeting includes the ability to buy specific channels for specific behaviors. Skater girl will need a new travel bag to lug those skates. Why not establish a trigger that creates a connection between her travel and shopping behavior?
Take it to the next level
To really get sophisticated, you can create a targeting scorecard for each user using a points system based on a number of the above items. If you're clearing out the remaining '03 Subaru inventory, you can create a scorecard based on specific shopping research activities plus search actions for car research sites, referral traffic to other car sites, referral traffic to dealer sites, and Yellow Page look-ups. You can also specify number of days, frequency within days and consistency of the desired actions.You may just learn the maximum conversion for driving a buyer to a dealer for a '03 model Impreza is a mix of 25 auto channel page views within two days, plus click-through traffic to at least three auto consideration sites.
Worth it?
This all may sound a bit complicated, but people tend to exhibit similar shopping behavior before they pull the transactional trigger. You must identify that process for your client and map the trigger points for behavioral targeting.For one airline client, we've found behavioral targeting can deliver between 30 and 40 percent more post-click activities and transactions than ROS (run-of-site) or even some contextual placements. Modeled correctly, it works very well.
Potential pitfalls
Items to bear in mind that can negatively impact results:Saturation can create overkill Don't create a trigger, then carpet bomb customers with every available impression. As with any frequency model, there's an opportunity to overdo it. Carefully consider frequency caps.
Difficulty of determining delivery and inventory management As with any user-generated data modeling technique, there's no way to measure the exact number of impressions you'll deliver. Run some decent-sized tests and negotiate the assignment priority of your ad serving. Will your ads always be superceded by other marketers' category-wide buys? Ask, or you could wait a long time to get the desired level of impressions.
Use customer research to determine ultimate impact Many online ad efforts require an offline conversion (e.g. a car purchase). So conduct post-session surveys to refine targeting algorithms and maximize success. You can trigger pre- and post-session research to determine if someone is more or less likely to consider a purchase. Benchmark behavioral targeting versus other buys to determine the lift effect.
Reward good behavior
What are we creating here? Behavioral targeting provides an increased opportunity for touch points between your brand and customers. We know users go online for a specific purpose or mission. Reward them with the information they want, via smart advertising.Put on a happy face! :)
The Web Offers Involvement Branding
The digital media space brings both the direct-response and the branding concepts together and allows them to be something more than the sum of their parts.
If you work in advertising and marketing and online media is a regular part of your consideration, then you’ve heard the argument many times over: Is online best used as a direct-response vehicle or for branding efforts?
In spite of the variety of different forms of advertising and all matter of media types, in the last few decades advertising itself has been classified as belonging to two general kingdoms: direct response and branding.
We all know the difference between the two and can generally identify a particular advertisement as belonging to one or the other category. On television, for instance, the average viewer can pick them out right away even if they don’t know how to label them. Ads that elicit an emotional response tend to connect with an audience in a way that is qualitatively different from commercials with blue screens, toll-free numbers and Ron Popeil.
Nowadays, most people working in or around interactive marketing shudder when the topic comes up. As the debate has raged for the last few years, it seems as though most reasonable people have concluded that the online medium, like many other media, can be used to accomplish both direct-response goals and branding goals. It is simply a matter of laying out the objective and then executing against it.
As with any dialectic endeavor, however, an either/or proposition rarely suffices and a good synthesis emerges; a synthesis that borrows something from two distinct elements that when placed in opposition with one another result in a third, better idea or experience. It’s like the old Reese’s commercial, “You’ve got your chocolate in my peanut butter!;” “And you’ve got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” In this case, the clash of branding with direct response is “Involvement Branding.”
The outcome of mixing the ethereal components of branding with the interactive and response-driven elements of direct response is a hybridized marketing engagement on the part of the consumer.
[Yahoo! has a trademark pending on the term, “Involvement Branding.”]
“In interactive media, viewers can literally involve themselves in a piece of communication. The likelihood of someone recalling a product/brand and remembering key message points goes up when people have this kind of involvement,” continues Riemer.
Online media is a different proposition from other more traditional forms of media. As an advertiser, I can put messages before potential consumers that extol the virtues of my particular product or service while associating it with a particular state of mind (branding) that has as a component a call to action, that is fulfilled upon response to the advertisement (direct response).
“We refer to this as ‘brand response,’” says Jason Heller, CEO and co-founder of Mass Transit, an advertising agency in New York that specializes in interactive media.
“Basically you are delivering a brand experience and generating actions that are innate to the medium. Not taking advantage of this part of consumer behavior is underutilizing the medium,” continues Heller.
It is a kind of advertising that seeks to create a brand experience by manufacturing an experience at all, and then allowing the user who has had that experience to respond to it. Better yet, the user's experience IS the response.
This view that there is something different about “involvement branding” than other forms of advertising before is not shared by all, however.
“[I] don’t think we really need new terms for these things,” says Kathryn Koegel, director of research & Marcom at DoubleClick. “All branding is involvement of the consumer: emotional, visceral, and intellectual.” It is Koegel’s belief that talking about online advertising in this fashion and attributing new terms like this merely confuses the endeavor.
“We need to stop saying it’s different and talk about its capabilities in terms marketers already use,” she says.
To some extent she is right, but there does seem to be something different in the offline realm about a brand-driven campaign versus one that seeks to elicit tangible response.
Broadcast media certainly doesn't seek to elicit feedback from an audience in the form of response to commercial messaging. A quantifiable causal relationship between exposure to an advertising asset and consumer action is not the ready-to-hand goal of broadcast advertising.
As for direct response, it really is specifically used for no other purpose then to move widgets. At the end of a 120-second spot, if a toll-free phone number appears on the screen and there is an address to which you can send your check or money order to purchase, the sole objective of that kind of advertising is to make a sale.
Involvement Branding TM in the context of online advertising does seem to be different.
That isn’t to say that most advertisers take advantage of online’s unique ability to bring two different advertising activities together, but they can, and those who do can learn from their marketing efforts in ways they could not before.
“The behavioral tracking and analytics that are possible with online certainly can be acted upon like direct-response factors,” says Paul Kadin, EVP of Marketing and Strategy at Eyeblaster. “But the science of using these kinds of measures and correlating them with brand image measures will allow those who see the synthesis to design interactive ads better. By measuring which ad formats, creative, and interactive designs generate the best brand impact, measures that have been ‘owned’ by direct response will be seen as more broadly useful.”
Adds DoubleClick’s Koegel: “It’s one of the great problems of the Internet: While more clients understand the use of the Internet for branding they’re still optimizing and measuring impact based on click through.”
Therein lies the rub. The majority of activity in the online advertising space is still strictly direct response. More than 60% of advertisers say they are using online as an acquisition tool, and more than 50% say they use online for immediate direct sales (DoubleClick Fall '02 Marketing Spending Index), meaning they are still using the medium specifically for accomplishing direct-response objectives. Advertisers in the space are still looking for a causal relationship between the advertising activity they are committing and revenue yielded as a result. Not that all advertisers don't want this to some degree with their advertising, but traditionally, the major advertisers understand advertising to be a more sublime endeavor that works over time.
Be that as it may, the roster of advertisers that many publishers are starting to get these days is reading more like that found in offline media. Traditional advertisers are finding their way to the Web, and it isn't because they are hoping to simply get users to click and buy their wares online. It is because the branding capabilities of the medium are starting to be demonstrated and those advertisers interested in branding are getting involved as a result.
“We have worked with clients on a wide variety of Involvement Branding? efforts,” says Riemer of Yahoo!. “This includes allowing the consumer to communicate by using the brand, such as with branded Yahoo! IMVironments, or allowing consumers to make choices about the brand, such as choosing which ending of the Sierra Mist ad (Pepsi) will run in the Super Bowl. These types of communications bring the consumer several steps closer to the brand and we have seen that they encourage affinity.”
As this example shows, Engagement Branding, or Involvement Branding?, is not just about getting users to respond more enthusiastically or in greater volumes to the ads that run, but rather about getting users to actually become part of the brand or product itself-- something like the M&Ms campaign that asked users to vote on what the new M&M color should be, or conducting surveys and quizzes, or letting users manipulate the product itself, like the old HP ad that let you print from the banner itself.
“A recent campaign for Discover magazine employed Eyeblaster expandable banners and 100K polite banner units to drive greater awareness of the magazine brand with an interactive quiz right in the ad units,” relates Kadin of Eyeblaster. “Orange, a wireless service provider in the UK, let users choose the color of their phone right in the Eyeblaster window ad. Ads for everything from Coca-Cola, Harry Potter and Chupa Chups lollipops let users ‘play’ with the ad by waving the product around or playing a game.”
But right now it appears that the kinds of Involvement Branding? executions that exemplify what is meant by the term are branded units that support some kind of game, otherwise known as “advergaming.”
“Rich media creates an interactive brand experience that can include an advergaming or other interaction aspect,” says Heller of Mass Transit. “Of course this is a creative messaging issue and I’m just a media guy. However, I see a lot of clients offering branded gaming experiences once consumers make it to their sites so that the experience can truly be even richer.”
Cory Treffiletti of FreeStyle Interactive, a full-service interactive advertising agency based in San Francisco, concurs. “Advergaming is widely utilized, as are any ideas that are spread virally as they then receive endorsement from the person who sent them on.”
Why is advergaming coming to the fore as a way to engage potential consumers with a brand and/or product? Because it asks for interaction on the part of a user that will likely provide a positive and fun experience with that particular brand and/or product.
Direct response has traditionally been more of a "lean forward" experience, especially in the online space, where an audience is asked to submit actively to a call to action.
Involvement Branding?, or Engagement Branding, brings these two ideas together, allowing for the rhetorical -- or as is often the case, kinetic -- exercise of convincing an individual that by interacting with a given product or service that individual will alter his or her relationship with the world around them in a positive, meaningful way while at the same time allowing that individual to satisfy the constructed need within the confines of the medium in which the advertising was encountered.
This kind of engagement leads to a deeper and potentially more meaningful relationship with a brand or product.
“The likelihood of someone recalling a product/brand and remembering key message points goes up when people have this kind of involvement,” says Yahoo’s Riemer. “David Aakers of the Haas Business School writes, ‘Because greater involvement and active participation make the Web considerably different from more conventional media, any impact is likely to be more intense. Learning is more likely to be remembered and to influence future behavior; active involvement is more likely to create a bond between the brand and the person.’”
Riemer and Aakers are not alone in their view, and it is a view that seems to make sense when looked at in the larger context of how it is that individuals come to understand their world around them. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago who developed the idea of the “flow experience” has seen his ideas become a staple in graduate marketing programs around the world, relatable as they are to marketing through engagement (not to mention his ideas were very popular in the early stages of the Web when site developers were trying to figure out how to create the best user experience in order to keep them coming back time and again). Those on the ground also see things in a similar light.
“If you can encourage interaction with a brand then that builds familiarity and increases the propensity to choose your brand over someone else’s,” states Treffiletti matter-of-factly.
“The Internet enables someone to execute creative that can involve the user and then elicit the direct response, that’s all,” Koegel says, contrary to the popular belief du jour. “I am very cynical about online creative that gets people to play games – it makes sense for some types of companies but I think it’s dumb for others: Does the game really enhance the brand or just make it seem silly?”
This is an important point to make; as I’ve often said, if I were teaching a class on advertising and marketing, I’d urge my students to read Frankenstein, or Prometheus Unbound. The reason: Because one of the morals of the story is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. However, it does seem that there is something to the notion of getting consumers involved in your brand in an active way while that brand is before them in a narrative or image context.
The problem with just thinking about this idea in terms of being a variation on the theme of direct response is that direct response can only accomplish so much in the way of serving as a sales channel or lead generator. At best, it is an ancillary means of sales and distribution of product. What do you do when you want to expand beyond the market of drunks, insomniacs, unemployed and impulse purchasers that late night TV and banner-ads has to offer? Enter-to-win-type engagement might lure a similar crowd, but there is something qualitatively different about advertising that tells you what it thinks or tells you what to do, and advertising that invites you to do something with it.
The digital media space brings both the direct-response and the branding concepts together and allows them to be something more than the sum of their parts, giving the audience something more than either exercise could by itself. By letting a consumer become part of your brand or product, you make way for that consumer letting your brand or product become part of them. And I don’t care what anyone says, THAT is marketing nirvana.
If you work in advertising and marketing and online media is a regular part of your consideration, then you’ve heard the argument many times over: Is online best used as a direct-response vehicle or for branding efforts?
In spite of the variety of different forms of advertising and all matter of media types, in the last few decades advertising itself has been classified as belonging to two general kingdoms: direct response and branding.
We all know the difference between the two and can generally identify a particular advertisement as belonging to one or the other category. On television, for instance, the average viewer can pick them out right away even if they don’t know how to label them. Ads that elicit an emotional response tend to connect with an audience in a way that is qualitatively different from commercials with blue screens, toll-free numbers and Ron Popeil.
Nowadays, most people working in or around interactive marketing shudder when the topic comes up. As the debate has raged for the last few years, it seems as though most reasonable people have concluded that the online medium, like many other media, can be used to accomplish both direct-response goals and branding goals. It is simply a matter of laying out the objective and then executing against it.
As with any dialectic endeavor, however, an either/or proposition rarely suffices and a good synthesis emerges; a synthesis that borrows something from two distinct elements that when placed in opposition with one another result in a third, better idea or experience. It’s like the old Reese’s commercial, “You’ve got your chocolate in my peanut butter!;” “And you’ve got your peanut butter on my chocolate!” In this case, the clash of branding with direct response is “Involvement Branding.”
The outcome of mixing the ethereal components of branding with the interactive and response-driven elements of direct response is a hybridized marketing engagement on the part of the consumer.
Enter Involvement Branding
“Involvement Branding ? as defined by Yahoo! is the concept of tapping into consumers’ urge to interact and involve them in the brand itself,” says David Riemer, VP of Marketing Solutions at Yahoo![Yahoo! has a trademark pending on the term, “Involvement Branding.”]
“In interactive media, viewers can literally involve themselves in a piece of communication. The likelihood of someone recalling a product/brand and remembering key message points goes up when people have this kind of involvement,” continues Riemer.
Online media is a different proposition from other more traditional forms of media. As an advertiser, I can put messages before potential consumers that extol the virtues of my particular product or service while associating it with a particular state of mind (branding) that has as a component a call to action, that is fulfilled upon response to the advertisement (direct response).
“We refer to this as ‘brand response,’” says Jason Heller, CEO and co-founder of Mass Transit, an advertising agency in New York that specializes in interactive media.
“Basically you are delivering a brand experience and generating actions that are innate to the medium. Not taking advantage of this part of consumer behavior is underutilizing the medium,” continues Heller.
A New Concept?
So Involvement Branding TM, or as it is often referred to, Engagement Branding, is a new opportunity in advertising, for which elements of branding can be married to response mechanisms within the same advertising event.It is a kind of advertising that seeks to create a brand experience by manufacturing an experience at all, and then allowing the user who has had that experience to respond to it. Better yet, the user's experience IS the response.
This view that there is something different about “involvement branding” than other forms of advertising before is not shared by all, however.
“[I] don’t think we really need new terms for these things,” says Kathryn Koegel, director of research & Marcom at DoubleClick. “All branding is involvement of the consumer: emotional, visceral, and intellectual.” It is Koegel’s belief that talking about online advertising in this fashion and attributing new terms like this merely confuses the endeavor.
“We need to stop saying it’s different and talk about its capabilities in terms marketers already use,” she says.
To some extent she is right, but there does seem to be something different in the offline realm about a brand-driven campaign versus one that seeks to elicit tangible response.
Broadcast media certainly doesn't seek to elicit feedback from an audience in the form of response to commercial messaging. A quantifiable causal relationship between exposure to an advertising asset and consumer action is not the ready-to-hand goal of broadcast advertising.
As for direct response, it really is specifically used for no other purpose then to move widgets. At the end of a 120-second spot, if a toll-free phone number appears on the screen and there is an address to which you can send your check or money order to purchase, the sole objective of that kind of advertising is to make a sale.
Involvement Branding TM in the context of online advertising does seem to be different.
That isn’t to say that most advertisers take advantage of online’s unique ability to bring two different advertising activities together, but they can, and those who do can learn from their marketing efforts in ways they could not before.
Unique Measurement Opportunities
“Many of the ‘branding’ clients out there today rely on direct-response metrics to gauge the success of their online campaigns simply because they can,” says Michael Jacobson, senior partner at Marketing Consumer, a New York-based online marketing company. “They use these metrics for success because they are available, rather than because of their pre-planned hybrid campaign goals. Often times this is a good thing, but sometimes traditional/branding clients get carried away in the extreme measurability the Internet provides, and stray from their initial branding-oriented goal.”“The behavioral tracking and analytics that are possible with online certainly can be acted upon like direct-response factors,” says Paul Kadin, EVP of Marketing and Strategy at Eyeblaster. “But the science of using these kinds of measures and correlating them with brand image measures will allow those who see the synthesis to design interactive ads better. By measuring which ad formats, creative, and interactive designs generate the best brand impact, measures that have been ‘owned’ by direct response will be seen as more broadly useful.”
Adds DoubleClick’s Koegel: “It’s one of the great problems of the Internet: While more clients understand the use of the Internet for branding they’re still optimizing and measuring impact based on click through.”
Therein lies the rub. The majority of activity in the online advertising space is still strictly direct response. More than 60% of advertisers say they are using online as an acquisition tool, and more than 50% say they use online for immediate direct sales (DoubleClick Fall '02 Marketing Spending Index), meaning they are still using the medium specifically for accomplishing direct-response objectives. Advertisers in the space are still looking for a causal relationship between the advertising activity they are committing and revenue yielded as a result. Not that all advertisers don't want this to some degree with their advertising, but traditionally, the major advertisers understand advertising to be a more sublime endeavor that works over time.
Be that as it may, the roster of advertisers that many publishers are starting to get these days is reading more like that found in offline media. Traditional advertisers are finding their way to the Web, and it isn't because they are hoping to simply get users to click and buy their wares online. It is because the branding capabilities of the medium are starting to be demonstrated and those advertisers interested in branding are getting involved as a result.
Involvement Branding Can Take Many Forms
The fact that the more traditional general marketers are utilizing the online medium simply as it is is exciting, but some are actually executing against the strengths of the medium as articulated by Involvement Branding TM, whether or not it is understood by this name.“We have worked with clients on a wide variety of Involvement Branding? efforts,” says Riemer of Yahoo!. “This includes allowing the consumer to communicate by using the brand, such as with branded Yahoo! IMVironments, or allowing consumers to make choices about the brand, such as choosing which ending of the Sierra Mist ad (Pepsi) will run in the Super Bowl. These types of communications bring the consumer several steps closer to the brand and we have seen that they encourage affinity.”
As this example shows, Engagement Branding, or Involvement Branding?, is not just about getting users to respond more enthusiastically or in greater volumes to the ads that run, but rather about getting users to actually become part of the brand or product itself-- something like the M&Ms campaign that asked users to vote on what the new M&M color should be, or conducting surveys and quizzes, or letting users manipulate the product itself, like the old HP ad that let you print from the banner itself.
“A recent campaign for Discover magazine employed Eyeblaster expandable banners and 100K polite banner units to drive greater awareness of the magazine brand with an interactive quiz right in the ad units,” relates Kadin of Eyeblaster. “Orange, a wireless service provider in the UK, let users choose the color of their phone right in the Eyeblaster window ad. Ads for everything from Coca-Cola, Harry Potter and Chupa Chups lollipops let users ‘play’ with the ad by waving the product around or playing a game.”
But right now it appears that the kinds of Involvement Branding? executions that exemplify what is meant by the term are branded units that support some kind of game, otherwise known as “advergaming.”
“Rich media creates an interactive brand experience that can include an advergaming or other interaction aspect,” says Heller of Mass Transit. “Of course this is a creative messaging issue and I’m just a media guy. However, I see a lot of clients offering branded gaming experiences once consumers make it to their sites so that the experience can truly be even richer.”
Cory Treffiletti of FreeStyle Interactive, a full-service interactive advertising agency based in San Francisco, concurs. “Advergaming is widely utilized, as are any ideas that are spread virally as they then receive endorsement from the person who sent them on.”
Why is advergaming coming to the fore as a way to engage potential consumers with a brand and/or product? Because it asks for interaction on the part of a user that will likely provide a positive and fun experience with that particular brand and/or product.
The Best of Both Worlds
As we’ve heard time and again, branding has traditionally been a "lean back" experience, a passive state of being awash in moods and tones tied to sound, motion, and images that all work in concert to elicit an emotional response from an audience that will connect with a given product or service.Direct response has traditionally been more of a "lean forward" experience, especially in the online space, where an audience is asked to submit actively to a call to action.
Involvement Branding?, or Engagement Branding, brings these two ideas together, allowing for the rhetorical -- or as is often the case, kinetic -- exercise of convincing an individual that by interacting with a given product or service that individual will alter his or her relationship with the world around them in a positive, meaningful way while at the same time allowing that individual to satisfy the constructed need within the confines of the medium in which the advertising was encountered.
This kind of engagement leads to a deeper and potentially more meaningful relationship with a brand or product.
“The likelihood of someone recalling a product/brand and remembering key message points goes up when people have this kind of involvement,” says Yahoo’s Riemer. “David Aakers of the Haas Business School writes, ‘Because greater involvement and active participation make the Web considerably different from more conventional media, any impact is likely to be more intense. Learning is more likely to be remembered and to influence future behavior; active involvement is more likely to create a bond between the brand and the person.’”
Riemer and Aakers are not alone in their view, and it is a view that seems to make sense when looked at in the larger context of how it is that individuals come to understand their world around them. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago who developed the idea of the “flow experience” has seen his ideas become a staple in graduate marketing programs around the world, relatable as they are to marketing through engagement (not to mention his ideas were very popular in the early stages of the Web when site developers were trying to figure out how to create the best user experience in order to keep them coming back time and again). Those on the ground also see things in a similar light.
“If you can encourage interaction with a brand then that builds familiarity and increases the propensity to choose your brand over someone else’s,” states Treffiletti matter-of-factly.
Proceed With Caution
Not everyone in the industry is convinced that Involvement Branding? and the current efforts the idea has spawned are meaningful.“The Internet enables someone to execute creative that can involve the user and then elicit the direct response, that’s all,” Koegel says, contrary to the popular belief du jour. “I am very cynical about online creative that gets people to play games – it makes sense for some types of companies but I think it’s dumb for others: Does the game really enhance the brand or just make it seem silly?”
This is an important point to make; as I’ve often said, if I were teaching a class on advertising and marketing, I’d urge my students to read Frankenstein, or Prometheus Unbound. The reason: Because one of the morals of the story is that just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. However, it does seem that there is something to the notion of getting consumers involved in your brand in an active way while that brand is before them in a narrative or image context.
The problem with just thinking about this idea in terms of being a variation on the theme of direct response is that direct response can only accomplish so much in the way of serving as a sales channel or lead generator. At best, it is an ancillary means of sales and distribution of product. What do you do when you want to expand beyond the market of drunks, insomniacs, unemployed and impulse purchasers that late night TV and banner-ads has to offer? Enter-to-win-type engagement might lure a similar crowd, but there is something qualitatively different about advertising that tells you what it thinks or tells you what to do, and advertising that invites you to do something with it.
The digital media space brings both the direct-response and the branding concepts together and allows them to be something more than the sum of their parts, giving the audience something more than either exercise could by itself. By letting a consumer become part of your brand or product, you make way for that consumer letting your brand or product become part of them. And I don’t care what anyone says, THAT is marketing nirvana.
Wednesday
Bright Future for Rich Media
A recent study conducted by Jupiter Research showed that rich media ads are projected to grow to 8% of total online spending in 2003, up to 11% in 2004 and up to 25% of online spending by 2008.
The survey was based on responses from 579 online marketers, asking which rich media ad formats advertisers use. Streaming media is set to grow much faster that the rest of rich media, reaching 3% of total online spending in 2003, 4% in 2004 and grow up to 14% by 2008.
Marketers plan to increase their usage of on-page ads, such as banners and skyscrapers using Flash, Java, Pointroll, Enliven and video, from 56% in 2003 to 67% in 2004.
Over-page advertisements, such as Eyeblaster, Shoshkeles, Ad4Ever and DHTML, are projected to reach 22% by 2004.
Marketers also said they will increase usage of Between-page advertisements such as Superstitials, Ultramercial and interstitials and Pre-roll video advertisements.
�These numbers back up what most sites are reporting � that rich media usage is on the rise,� says Nate Elliot, Jupiter research�s associate ad analyst. �But sites and rich media vendors still need to work together to make it easier to implement rich media ads, and to prove the effectiveness of those rich media campaigns.�
The survey was based on responses from 579 online marketers, asking which rich media ad formats advertisers use. Streaming media is set to grow much faster that the rest of rich media, reaching 3% of total online spending in 2003, 4% in 2004 and grow up to 14% by 2008.
Marketers plan to increase their usage of on-page ads, such as banners and skyscrapers using Flash, Java, Pointroll, Enliven and video, from 56% in 2003 to 67% in 2004.
Over-page advertisements, such as Eyeblaster, Shoshkeles, Ad4Ever and DHTML, are projected to reach 22% by 2004.
Marketers also said they will increase usage of Between-page advertisements such as Superstitials, Ultramercial and interstitials and Pre-roll video advertisements.
�These numbers back up what most sites are reporting � that rich media usage is on the rise,� says Nate Elliot, Jupiter research�s associate ad analyst. �But sites and rich media vendors still need to work together to make it easier to implement rich media ads, and to prove the effectiveness of those rich media campaigns.�
Bright Future for Rich Media
A recent study conducted by Jupiter Research showed that rich media ads are projected to grow to 8% of total online spending in 2003, up to 11% in 2004 and up to 25% of online spending by 2008.
The survey was based on responses from 579 online marketers, asking which rich media ad formats advertisers use. Streaming media is set to grow much faster that the rest of rich media, reaching 3% of total online spending in 2003, 4% in 2004 and grow up to 14% by 2008.
Marketers plan to increase their usage of on-page ads, such as banners and skyscrapers using Flash, Java, Pointroll, Enliven and video, from 56% in 2003 to 67% in 2004.
Over-page advertisements, such as Eyeblaster, Shoshkeles, Ad4Ever and DHTML, are projected to reach 22% by 2004.
Marketers also said they will increase usage of Between-page advertisements such as Superstitials, Ultramercial and interstitials and Pre-roll video advertisements.
“These numbers back up what most sites are reporting – that rich media usage is on the rise,” says Nate Elliot, Jupiter research’s associate ad analyst. “But sites and rich media vendors still need to work together to make it easier to implement rich media ads, and to prove the effectiveness of those rich media campaigns.”
The survey was based on responses from 579 online marketers, asking which rich media ad formats advertisers use. Streaming media is set to grow much faster that the rest of rich media, reaching 3% of total online spending in 2003, 4% in 2004 and grow up to 14% by 2008.
Marketers plan to increase their usage of on-page ads, such as banners and skyscrapers using Flash, Java, Pointroll, Enliven and video, from 56% in 2003 to 67% in 2004.
Over-page advertisements, such as Eyeblaster, Shoshkeles, Ad4Ever and DHTML, are projected to reach 22% by 2004.
Marketers also said they will increase usage of Between-page advertisements such as Superstitials, Ultramercial and interstitials and Pre-roll video advertisements.
“These numbers back up what most sites are reporting – that rich media usage is on the rise,” says Nate Elliot, Jupiter research’s associate ad analyst. “But sites and rich media vendors still need to work together to make it easier to implement rich media ads, and to prove the effectiveness of those rich media campaigns.”
Tuesday
Amid Ad Network Consolidation, A Fast Player Sets The Stage For Expansion
Just as the field of online advertising networks looked to be contracting, steps being announced today could drive it back into expansion mode. Ironically, the source of those expansion plans, new Fastclick president-CFO Kurt Johnson, was a key player in the development of ValueClick, a leading ad network that has been consolidating the industry.
As CFO of ValueClick from 1999 to 2002, Johnson led the network through its initial public offering, which ultimately put it in a position to acquire a variety of public and private leaders in the online field, including OnResponse, MediaPlex and BeFree. Last week, ValueClick continued its consolidation play, acquiring Commission Junction, a leading affiliate marketing company and a competitor of BeFree’s.
Johnson, how left ValueClick over a year ago, tells MediaDailyNews he plans to follow that playbook at Fastclick, one of the fastest growing online ad networks and a newcomer to the ad serving marketplace. While small by comparison to publicly traded online ad networks like ValueClick and 24/7 Real Media, Johnson says that can be changed through with the help of “external capital,” including a potential public offering.
In fact, he says Fastclick already is beating its peers by one important financial metric: the amount of revenues it derives per employee, which he says is “probably two to six times greater” than its public company peers.
Johnson should know. Besides being intimate with ValueClick’s results, he was part of a team that evaluated Fastclick as a possible ValueClick acquisition before leaving ValueClick. Johnson said he kept in touch with Fastclick’s management team and monitored the company’s progress before opting to come on board.
“They have developed an extremely creative business model by developing best- in-class technology. As a result, they have been able to develop business to a much faster degree and retain business to a much faster degree than their peers,” says Johnson.
Johnson would not disclose the Fastclick’s exact revenue-to-employee ratio, but he did note that Fastclick currently has about 30 employees compared to ValueClick’s 110 employees.
“My objectives for the company is to triple the size of the company in revenues and maintain the kind of profitability the company now experiences,” says Johnson.
Fastclick currently reaches about 62 million unique users through its network and is utilized mainly by direct marketers, though it is beginning to make headway with online brand marketers.
As CFO of ValueClick from 1999 to 2002, Johnson led the network through its initial public offering, which ultimately put it in a position to acquire a variety of public and private leaders in the online field, including OnResponse, MediaPlex and BeFree. Last week, ValueClick continued its consolidation play, acquiring Commission Junction, a leading affiliate marketing company and a competitor of BeFree’s.
Johnson, how left ValueClick over a year ago, tells MediaDailyNews he plans to follow that playbook at Fastclick, one of the fastest growing online ad networks and a newcomer to the ad serving marketplace. While small by comparison to publicly traded online ad networks like ValueClick and 24/7 Real Media, Johnson says that can be changed through with the help of “external capital,” including a potential public offering.
In fact, he says Fastclick already is beating its peers by one important financial metric: the amount of revenues it derives per employee, which he says is “probably two to six times greater” than its public company peers.
Johnson should know. Besides being intimate with ValueClick’s results, he was part of a team that evaluated Fastclick as a possible ValueClick acquisition before leaving ValueClick. Johnson said he kept in touch with Fastclick’s management team and monitored the company’s progress before opting to come on board.
“They have developed an extremely creative business model by developing best- in-class technology. As a result, they have been able to develop business to a much faster degree and retain business to a much faster degree than their peers,” says Johnson.
Johnson would not disclose the Fastclick’s exact revenue-to-employee ratio, but he did note that Fastclick currently has about 30 employees compared to ValueClick’s 110 employees.
“My objectives for the company is to triple the size of the company in revenues and maintain the kind of profitability the company now experiences,” says Johnson.
Fastclick currently reaches about 62 million unique users through its network and is utilized mainly by direct marketers, though it is beginning to make headway with online brand marketers.
