Saturday
Advantage over traditional media: Accountability
Like a couple wedded for decades who don't necessarily still love each other, staying in the marriage out of habit (or until the kids leave), the media and service bureaus who measure their audiences continue to carp at one another.
Tom Ryder, chairman and chief executive officer of Reader's Digest Association and the newly elected chairman of Magazine Publishers of America, is upset with the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
"We are being asked to provide more and more information, and adhere to standards that cost us more and more money, and we're getting the feeling we are being asked that so we can be asked to charge less for the advertising we sell," Ryder complained to one reporter.
Meanwhile, the broadcast networks are complaining because Nielsen, a unit of VNU, a Netherlands media company, has confirmed that men age 18 to 34, a demographic group coveted by advertisers, are watching between 8 percent and 12 percent less primetime TV than they did last year.
Just like the embattled married couple, the feuding has been going on for years.
"When ratings are up, it's the programs. When they're down, it's Nielsen," Jack Loftus, a Nielsen spokesman, told The Wall Street Journal.
To further exhaust the squabbling-couple analogy, the warring factions are throwing only glancing blows, and this is for two reasons. One, they are interdependent, so the public assaults over time hurt both. The other reason is that neither side wants to address the real underlying issue: advertising ROI.
Their discomfort could only increase by looking at the internet.
After a booming start, the medium was, like Obleo, banished to the Pointless Forest for over-promising on the never-practical-to-begin-with idea of one-to-one marketing.
But the internet has since emerged, armed with new behavioral targeting technology that can convincingly prove that online ads are actually seen, really prompt audiences to act, and can produce actual sales for advertisers.
While this may sound kind of basic to successful advertising, no other medium (with the possible exception of lowly regarded direct mail) can show this kind of accountability.
Audience guarantees in print and broadcast are projections, guesstimates if you will, of how many people will see your commercial or print ad. They are often wrong, resulting in make-goods, free ads provided by the network or the publisher to make up for audience shortfalls.
Moreover, unless the ads have some sort of call to action like an 800 number, coupon or a reader response card, neither magazine publishers nor broadcasters can prove anybody saw your ad.
Sure, huge bucks are spent on studies to determine the likelihood of viewers and readers seeing your ad, but they too are only guesstimates, and they still can't prove the ad prompted anyone to get up and go out and buy your product.
Imagine you're the publisher of a monthly magazine. Twice yearly you report your subscription and newsstand sales for the preceding six months. By the time your unaudited circulation statements are printed and distributed, your advertisers are looking at data that might be nine months old. It'll be another year or more before those numbers are audited, printed and distributed. Your reps are knocking on media buyers' doors trying to get insertion orders for campaigns that won't appear until eight weeks from now, using data that is 18 months old.
By contrast, the internet can give advertisers an exact moment-by-moment audience body count, can show how many people might have seen your ad, how many people actually played the ad or clicked on it, how many of those took action as a result, how many phone calls the retailer got and how many product units moved off the shelves as a result.
The missing ingredient in internet advertising was publisher data on who comprised their audiences, but that is being quickly resolved by widespread user registration so that web publishers now know who is on their sites broken out by age, sex, location and often more granular information such as income and kids in the home.
Unlike any other medium, the internet can now cross-reference demographic data with behavioral data, which gives further clues into the profiles of the users.
Visit the recipe pages a lot? Fair chance you are a woman who likes to cook.
Look up your online portfolio three times a day? Good bet you are an active investor.
Booked a high-end hotel room online? You're probably a business traveler.
True that magazine publishers and broadcasters periodically survey their audiences to get this same kind of information, but they hit only a small sample and once again, guesstimate the real numbers.
Online the numbers are actual and in real time. There is no gap between promise and delivery.
The real reason traditional media are groaning about their service bureaus is that when they do uncover downward trends, it comes well after the promises were made that sold the advertising. Advertisers, having bought on those promises, are then prompted to ask if they are getting a fair return on their investments.
With TV and magazines, they only really find out when it's too late
.
Tom Ryder, chairman and chief executive officer of Reader's Digest Association and the newly elected chairman of Magazine Publishers of America, is upset with the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
"We are being asked to provide more and more information, and adhere to standards that cost us more and more money, and we're getting the feeling we are being asked that so we can be asked to charge less for the advertising we sell," Ryder complained to one reporter.
Meanwhile, the broadcast networks are complaining because Nielsen, a unit of VNU, a Netherlands media company, has confirmed that men age 18 to 34, a demographic group coveted by advertisers, are watching between 8 percent and 12 percent less primetime TV than they did last year.
Just like the embattled married couple, the feuding has been going on for years.
"When ratings are up, it's the programs. When they're down, it's Nielsen," Jack Loftus, a Nielsen spokesman, told The Wall Street Journal.
To further exhaust the squabbling-couple analogy, the warring factions are throwing only glancing blows, and this is for two reasons. One, they are interdependent, so the public assaults over time hurt both. The other reason is that neither side wants to address the real underlying issue: advertising ROI.
Their discomfort could only increase by looking at the internet.
After a booming start, the medium was, like Obleo, banished to the Pointless Forest for over-promising on the never-practical-to-begin-with idea of one-to-one marketing.
But the internet has since emerged, armed with new behavioral targeting technology that can convincingly prove that online ads are actually seen, really prompt audiences to act, and can produce actual sales for advertisers.
While this may sound kind of basic to successful advertising, no other medium (with the possible exception of lowly regarded direct mail) can show this kind of accountability.
Audience guarantees in print and broadcast are projections, guesstimates if you will, of how many people will see your commercial or print ad. They are often wrong, resulting in make-goods, free ads provided by the network or the publisher to make up for audience shortfalls.
Moreover, unless the ads have some sort of call to action like an 800 number, coupon or a reader response card, neither magazine publishers nor broadcasters can prove anybody saw your ad.
Sure, huge bucks are spent on studies to determine the likelihood of viewers and readers seeing your ad, but they too are only guesstimates, and they still can't prove the ad prompted anyone to get up and go out and buy your product.
Imagine you're the publisher of a monthly magazine. Twice yearly you report your subscription and newsstand sales for the preceding six months. By the time your unaudited circulation statements are printed and distributed, your advertisers are looking at data that might be nine months old. It'll be another year or more before those numbers are audited, printed and distributed. Your reps are knocking on media buyers' doors trying to get insertion orders for campaigns that won't appear until eight weeks from now, using data that is 18 months old.
By contrast, the internet can give advertisers an exact moment-by-moment audience body count, can show how many people might have seen your ad, how many people actually played the ad or clicked on it, how many of those took action as a result, how many phone calls the retailer got and how many product units moved off the shelves as a result.
The missing ingredient in internet advertising was publisher data on who comprised their audiences, but that is being quickly resolved by widespread user registration so that web publishers now know who is on their sites broken out by age, sex, location and often more granular information such as income and kids in the home.
Unlike any other medium, the internet can now cross-reference demographic data with behavioral data, which gives further clues into the profiles of the users.
Visit the recipe pages a lot? Fair chance you are a woman who likes to cook.
Look up your online portfolio three times a day? Good bet you are an active investor.
Booked a high-end hotel room online? You're probably a business traveler.
True that magazine publishers and broadcasters periodically survey their audiences to get this same kind of information, but they hit only a small sample and once again, guesstimate the real numbers.
Online the numbers are actual and in real time. There is no gap between promise and delivery.
The real reason traditional media are groaning about their service bureaus is that when they do uncover downward trends, it comes well after the promises were made that sold the advertising. Advertisers, having bought on those promises, are then prompted to ask if they are getting a fair return on their investments.
With TV and magazines, they only really find out when it's too late
Friday
2004: We're Back... Now Let's Not Mess It Up
Across the industry, I've been hearing planners and buyers singing a different tune than they might have been last year. It seems that for 2004, marketers are seriously ramping up their online efforts. Perhaps it's the realization on the client side that folks are becoming tougher to reach with traditional media. Maybe it's because the IAB has done some great things to prove that online is a necessary component of many media plans. Then again, it might be frustration with the lack of accountability on the traditional side.
Whatever the reasons, it appears that we're poised for an upswing. Since I'm a firm believer that goal-setting is half the battle when running online media, I think we should be careful to avoid the mistakes we've made in the past and make sure that we set goals very carefully. After all, we don't want to be in the same boat we were in a few years back, when many clients declared that "online doesn't work."
Many online campaigns that fail were set up to do so from the very beginning. In many cases, clients get excited about measuring the effects of their online campaigns, but they judge success against the wrong metrics. To avoid this, do a careful assessment of objectives and make sure that the data that is being provided back to clients is aligned with those objectives.
For instance, if a client wants to increase awareness of their brand, don't send them performance reports that focus on click through rates (CTR). If CTR is presented as a valid metric, clients might see low CTRs and get upset about it. If brand awareness is the objective, a brand survey should be the yardstick, not CTR. Ensure that all your clients are keeping their "eyes on the prize," so to speak.
In setting objectives, be sure that you're not overpromising. Leverage any data you have on hand to predict things like response, brand impact and other success measures. If things seem out of whack, like if a client wants to deliver a million leads per quarter at 10 cents a lead with an offer like "Enter to win a bag of 10,000 marbles" you're in trouble. Adjust expectations before the campaign begins, otherwise you'll set yourself up to fail.
As if you needed an additional incentive to keep clients away from unrealistic expectations, remember that such clients are likely to walk away from the medium entirely if they don't achieve their objectives. This happened when the dot com bubble burst, and it can happen again. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not live through another period of widespread abandonment of our medium. We're fortunate enough to have a second chance, let's be thankful for it and ensure that we hit a home run this time around.
Whatever the reasons, it appears that we're poised for an upswing. Since I'm a firm believer that goal-setting is half the battle when running online media, I think we should be careful to avoid the mistakes we've made in the past and make sure that we set goals very carefully. After all, we don't want to be in the same boat we were in a few years back, when many clients declared that "online doesn't work."
Many online campaigns that fail were set up to do so from the very beginning. In many cases, clients get excited about measuring the effects of their online campaigns, but they judge success against the wrong metrics. To avoid this, do a careful assessment of objectives and make sure that the data that is being provided back to clients is aligned with those objectives.
For instance, if a client wants to increase awareness of their brand, don't send them performance reports that focus on click through rates (CTR). If CTR is presented as a valid metric, clients might see low CTRs and get upset about it. If brand awareness is the objective, a brand survey should be the yardstick, not CTR. Ensure that all your clients are keeping their "eyes on the prize," so to speak.
In setting objectives, be sure that you're not overpromising. Leverage any data you have on hand to predict things like response, brand impact and other success measures. If things seem out of whack, like if a client wants to deliver a million leads per quarter at 10 cents a lead with an offer like "Enter to win a bag of 10,000 marbles" you're in trouble. Adjust expectations before the campaign begins, otherwise you'll set yourself up to fail.
As if you needed an additional incentive to keep clients away from unrealistic expectations, remember that such clients are likely to walk away from the medium entirely if they don't achieve their objectives. This happened when the dot com bubble burst, and it can happen again. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not live through another period of widespread abandonment of our medium. We're fortunate enough to have a second chance, let's be thankful for it and ensure that we hit a home run this time around.
Nielsen//NetRatings Questions Panel Members
Internet metrics firm Nielsen//NetRatings (Quote, Chart) jumped into the online survey game Tuesday with WebIntercept, a tool that queries panel members based on their behavior online. Nielsen//NetRatings says it's been conducting such surveys for about a month and a half.
"This was really driven by customer demand," said Sean Kaldor, VP of corporate marketing and business development at Nielsen//NetRatings. "Our customers have continued to come to us asking us to survey our [ratings] panel, but we won't let them do that because it affects [the panel's] behavior."
WebIntercept uses a panel of Internet users recruited by Nielsen//NetRatings, but it's separate from the panel it uses to compute ratings and rankings for Web sites. Initially, the global survey panel will consist of two million respondents, but that will be expanded to three million next month.
Because it has software installed on these users' machines, Nielsen//NetRatings can initiate surveys based on their behavior online. For example, the company recently surveyed people when they logged on to a search engine, asking them the purpose of the search. The survey could also be triggered by the completion of an activity, such as an online purchase -- either on the client's site or on a competitor's. With some members of its panel, the company can initiate research based on what items they are buying online or how much they are spending.
The announcement follows competitor comScore Networks' formal launch last week of a similar service, Survey Solutions, which it hired former NFO WorldGroup president and COO Randy Smith to head. ComScore said it had been doing survey work for the past two years, but hired Smith to focus more resources on the space.
Online research has been a skyrocketing segment of the overall research market, and some expect the Federal Do-Not-Call list to only speed the growth of the online segment.
"It's pretty clear that the problems with telephone-based surveys were opening up a big opportunity for us," said comScore's Smith.
The two services seem to be quite similar, although Kaldor notes his company's panelists aren't given any incentive to participate. ComScore has typically given its panelists software that speeds their connections to the Internet.
ComScore, for its part, trumpets its two years of experience in offering the service -- although it only formally launched last week -- and says the historical attitudinal data it's built up makes its product superior.
"This was really driven by customer demand," said Sean Kaldor, VP of corporate marketing and business development at Nielsen//NetRatings. "Our customers have continued to come to us asking us to survey our [ratings] panel, but we won't let them do that because it affects [the panel's] behavior."
WebIntercept uses a panel of Internet users recruited by Nielsen//NetRatings, but it's separate from the panel it uses to compute ratings and rankings for Web sites. Initially, the global survey panel will consist of two million respondents, but that will be expanded to three million next month.
Because it has software installed on these users' machines, Nielsen//NetRatings can initiate surveys based on their behavior online. For example, the company recently surveyed people when they logged on to a search engine, asking them the purpose of the search. The survey could also be triggered by the completion of an activity, such as an online purchase -- either on the client's site or on a competitor's. With some members of its panel, the company can initiate research based on what items they are buying online or how much they are spending.
The announcement follows competitor comScore Networks' formal launch last week of a similar service, Survey Solutions, which it hired former NFO WorldGroup president and COO Randy Smith to head. ComScore said it had been doing survey work for the past two years, but hired Smith to focus more resources on the space.
Online research has been a skyrocketing segment of the overall research market, and some expect the Federal Do-Not-Call list to only speed the growth of the online segment.
"It's pretty clear that the problems with telephone-based surveys were opening up a big opportunity for us," said comScore's Smith.
The two services seem to be quite similar, although Kaldor notes his company's panelists aren't given any incentive to participate. ComScore has typically given its panelists software that speeds their connections to the Internet.
ComScore, for its part, trumpets its two years of experience in offering the service -- although it only formally launched last week -- and says the historical attitudinal data it's built up makes its product superior.
Shopping.com Educates Offline Shoppers
In a bid to win customers, and, through them, advertisers, during the important holiday season, comparison shopping site Shopping.com has launched its first TV ad campaign.
The ads, developed by San Francisco-based Publicis & Hal Riney, aim to educate consumers about online price comparison services and to inspire them to try Shopping.com.
The campaign's initial 30-second broadcast spot began airing today in New York, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. Shopping.com said it is part of a test it is conducting to gauge the effectiveness of offline media in driving consumer behavior online. The company hopes to use TV advertising to reach a group of consumers who may not have heard of price comparison on the Web.
"Our market research revealed that the vast majority of consumers are simply unaware of comparison shopping sites," said Nirav Tolia, Shopping.com's chief operating officer.
The initial spot, which targets consumers aged 25 to 49, will air on local evening and morning broadcasts as well as news and primetime cable channels throughout the holiday season. The company declined to name specific channels or programming, nor did it divulge its media spend.
The creative depicts two scenarios in which a shopper learns too late the Internet offered a better value on a product he just bought. The spot then provides a demonstration of Shopping.com's interface.
Kirk Souder, president and executive creative director at Publicis & Hal Riney, said the agency tried to advance the notion that shoppers need never again feel buyer's remorse.
"That's a very powerful idea," he said.
Shopping.com was formed this year after established shopping search site DealTime merged with customer review platform Epinions and took a new name. It has faced an increasingly crowded field of online price comparison sites, including NexTag, BizRate, Pricegrabber, and most recently, a company called Priceflo, which launched last week. Additionally, Yahoo! recently integrated its shopping area with product search. Google also offers a version of the service, though its Froogle.com site.
The ads, developed by San Francisco-based Publicis & Hal Riney, aim to educate consumers about online price comparison services and to inspire them to try Shopping.com.
The campaign's initial 30-second broadcast spot began airing today in New York, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. Shopping.com said it is part of a test it is conducting to gauge the effectiveness of offline media in driving consumer behavior online. The company hopes to use TV advertising to reach a group of consumers who may not have heard of price comparison on the Web.
"Our market research revealed that the vast majority of consumers are simply unaware of comparison shopping sites," said Nirav Tolia, Shopping.com's chief operating officer.
The initial spot, which targets consumers aged 25 to 49, will air on local evening and morning broadcasts as well as news and primetime cable channels throughout the holiday season. The company declined to name specific channels or programming, nor did it divulge its media spend.
The creative depicts two scenarios in which a shopper learns too late the Internet offered a better value on a product he just bought. The spot then provides a demonstration of Shopping.com's interface.
Kirk Souder, president and executive creative director at Publicis & Hal Riney, said the agency tried to advance the notion that shoppers need never again feel buyer's remorse.
"That's a very powerful idea," he said.
Shopping.com was formed this year after established shopping search site DealTime merged with customer review platform Epinions and took a new name. It has faced an increasingly crowded field of online price comparison sites, including NexTag, BizRate, Pricegrabber, and most recently, a company called Priceflo, which launched last week. Additionally, Yahoo! recently integrated its shopping area with product search. Google also offers a version of the service, though its Froogle.com site.
