Always practice safe strategy!

Warning! Interactive media planning can be dangerous to your health. Always wear protection.

Why don’t you care about your brand?

Re/Max – you do care – so you’re off the hook (but contact us anyway – as we want to work with you on your interactive advertising). But the other 100 companies – I’m very intrigued by.

What happened over the last month was extremely interesting here at Media Two. We embarked upon an online ad campaign on an unnamed search engine (ok – it was Google) that not only showed that advertising agencies believe in using search, but that we are creative masters at using it for ourselves as well as our clients. I don’t want to spoil the results of our campaign as we have a soon-to-be-released case study (AdWeek – AdAge – any interest?), but let’s just say that we targeted 101 potential clients with our messaging. In addition to the results of the campaign, we found another interesting phenom… No one was protecting their trademarked brand name.

Of the 101 Brands that we targeted, only Re/Max didn’t allow us to market towards their name. One other client politely said “OK – you got my attention; now get off my brand names”. An even more interesting occurrence happened with the Bank of America. I’m not claiming it’s someone in their marketing department, but I am claiming it smells like a funny way of watching your brand. Instead of contacting us, or filling out the appropriate Trademark complaint/protection form with Google (FYI Brand Marketers - REALLY easy if you simply go to http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html), what happened was “someone”, located in the city of Charlotte, repeatedly clicked on our ad over a short time period (minutes), and spent less than 1 second on our landing page… Hmmm… Yes, it eventually depleted our perceived budget, but then Google replenished it when it noticed the blatant click-fraud (all without us asking – so thank you Google and your supposed non-existent click fraud protection group) and we were back online again.

So my question is – if you’re not watching your own brands – who is? More importantly, if you are watching your brand, what are you doing about it… I can assure you we’ll have a case study on this as well.

Why CFOs Don’t Believe in Online Advertising

Just getting caught up on my industry reading and I came across this article titled Why CFOs Don't Believe In Online Advertising. Now, at this point, I tell you why you should care about this article as well. It discussing one fo the most important parts of a direct response campaign - Reporting. The article is about analyzing campaign results and offers some very important elements to keep in mind. These come second nature to savvy direct marketers, but it's nice to have someone put them in writing. So, thank you Stephan Pretorius. Although the article is clearly addressed to "client-side marketers", it is useful for anyone in the industry, no matter what side of the desk you sit. For my entry, we'll focus on the agency side of things.

It starts off discussing data integrity, which is a critical component of the results and analysis, and it will cause a loss in credibility if the accuracy comes into question. That said, there will always be reporting discrepancies. There's no way around it as there's too many "cooks in the kitchen" when tracking an online ad campaign, which is why the IAB has verbiage related to these occurrences to help the situation. However, the best bet is to follow the advice mentioned in the article. Come up with a solid Media Measurement Framework that your client will be comfortable with. This should be decided upon before any impression is served.

All six (counting engagement mapping as it's own point) points are important, but there are a couple that I'd like to highlight in the rest of the blog. First, data integration is extremely important and can be very challenging. I've seen this accomplished two ways, through the adserver or manually. My preference was the backend metrics being plugged into the frontend data through the adserver. This way, it is all together when a report is pulled. Some adservers or client's system are not set up to do this, so the only other way is to integrate the data manually, which is time consuming. This is the step where the discrepancy occurs more often than not.

Quickly, the duplication of conversions when using a performance venue is a huge issue, so measures should absolutely be put into place to de-dupe those.

Lastly, and probably most important, "Make your metrics relevant to your business"! This cannot be stressed more. Custom reporting that speaks to the client's business is what separates Media Two from other agencies. If you followed point 1 and are tracking EVERYTHING, then you will have metrics that you are reporting on that are specific to your client. So, if all of your reports, that you are showing your clients, just have impressions, clicks, cost and conversions, then you are doing an injustice to your client, and more importantly, yourself. Of course, the main objective is to drive sales, but there are a substantial amount of secondary benefits and learnings that can help your client, but you must be able to track and report on them. For example, these can be an email capture, refer a friend or a whitepaper download. Although these may not be your desired actions, these secondary benefits can only help in proving the worth of the online medium within the marketing mix.

In closing, this last point corresponds with the last point in the article. Most of the job postings and resumes I've ever read have something about "staying abreast with industry trends". Even in interviews, you may be asked this very question. My recommendation to you is answer by saying Engagement Mapping. There has been a lot of talk about this reporting feature, and although I do feel it is an excellent feature for your client, it is far from the piece de resistance everyone keeps pushing it as. This goes back to point five in the article. You and your client decide how important it is and how to quantify or assign weight to the touchpoints in the conversion stream, because it should never be a standard allocation.

My first Retraction

Yesterday I posted a Blog that may have been perceived as a little critical of ad servers and I have received some feed back/questions about my statements, so I have taken it down and decided to post this explanatory statement. It was not my intent to belittle any ones company or ad server and i thought that I had made positive points about both ad servers mentioned, I was trying rather to make the point that the interactive advertising industry is a constantly growing and changing environment and the ad server industry as a whole has the difficult task of growing and improving at a competitive pace in order to stay ahead of the "curve" and their competitors. Once again I did not intend to create controversy, and was only trying to provide an insiders point of view of functionality and future needs since I work so closely with the ad servers.