Over the past few weeks there has been lively debate on these pages
between some of Asia's leading Internet professionals.
There have been studies declaring that on-line advertising is
ineffective, letters arguing that print ads have no better recall than
on-line, and finally agencies asserting that their campaigns don't
suffer from declining click-through-rates (CTR).
All of the debate though should give us pause, and encourage us to ask:
is the industry really so fragmented in its opinions? Or is everyone
simply missing the point?
A recent US study may shed some light on the issue. Over the six-month
period of its Online Advertising Report, AdKnowledge tagged millions of
Internet users who were exposed to banners ads and then watched their
behaviour.
They found that the people who saw an ad, but never clicked, made more
conversions to on-line sales/actions than the people who had clicked on
the banners.
This result reinforces that the return on investment (ROI) for on-line
advertising is likely much higher than it seems simply from
click-through-rates. Mr Steve Findley, VP of AdKnoweldge, summed it up
by claiming that "advertisers that focus only on clicks or even
post-click conversions may miss vitally important effects of an
advertising campaign".
The element of accountability - being able to develop concrete metrics
such as cost-per-customer acquired - is the real benefit to come from
on-line marketing.
By working together as a unified industry, traditional and new media, we
are finally able to offer clients effective campaigns with exact
measurement.
Banner ads are just a small part of on-line marketing, as are opt-in
emails, rich media and WAP.
Like cinema ads, buses and post cards, these are tools, which have their
use, but to be most effective they must be integrated into the rest of a
campaign.
Integrating on-line marketing allows us to move beyond measuring just
recall and recognition, as the recent HKBU study did, and start
measuring the real drivers of our clients' businesses: preference, sales
and loyalty.
Only by taking this important step towards inter-agency cooperation and
integration will we be able to tap these incredible new
capabilities.
As Jack says: "Why can't we all just get along?"
jay@bluesphere.net.
