FOCUS: TECHNOLOGY MARKETING SEMINAR - Uncertainty clouds not just how to market, but how to measure. Panel urges guerrilla tactics to lure eyeballs to websites

In the state of flux that dominates advertising on the Web, the issue of how to measure the success of online advertising is plaguing online advertisers, interactive agencies and media specialists alike. At MEDIA's Technology Marketing Seminar held in Hong Kong, delegates were caught in the cross-fire on which method, if any, is evolving as the definitive, reliable means of advertising measurement on the Web. Olivia Head reports. According to Space Asia operations director Peter Burton, a marketer's main objective is to pull together optimisation, brand maximisation and the bottom line. "Essentially, you can start off with a whole bunch of banners and a whole bunch of sites, but what you're really aiming for is the return from those sites," he said. And with the power of pageviews and hits increasingly called into question, consumers are demanding value propositions in exchange for site loyalty. "The value proposition is from real intent, prospective customers entering your site - and the bottom line failing to be seen is that sites are not just out there for content, but are there to create revenue and sales opportunities," said AIM Asia managing director, Mr Gerald Alleva. AdMomentum CEO David Teng called for a shift in the factors that constituted a return on adspend investment, which hinged on both marketing approach and the solicited outcome of a campaign. "Our intention should be to use an effective reporting system to communicate the data - some clients look for the data itself, some look for giveaways, some look for CPM and others look for the return on investment." Nevertheless, differing client dictates were irrespective of one fundamental fact, that the effectiveness of Internet advertising did not eclipse outdoor or print. "The beauty of advertising on the 'Net lies in the power of a transaction and being able to tailor your ads to the users," Mr Teng said. And one test of online advertising - measuring effective sponsorship - was proving another stumbling block: click-through rates. "Measuring the effectiveness of a sponsorship campaign is more a matter of the parties involved sitting down and working out what their real objective is," said Mr Joseph Sweeney of The Gartner Group. "Any sponsorship campaign raises the issue of the real-world sponsor, with the other part of the equation questioning what that co-branding brings to the website that is running and driving it". The real skill of savvy emarketers, he added, lay in fleshing-out the attractive add-ons - traffic-driving online competitions and sweepstakes, affiliate partners to maximise sponsorship programmes and referral fees to re-direct accidental users who come to your site. Brandishing real-time banner tracking as an equally effective sponsorship tool, Space Asia's Mr Burton advocated using the banner to track new users entering a site. While calling into question out-and-out banner integrity, an interesting analogy surfaced. If print media and banners hypothetically swapped places, the banner scenario - where one in 300 people currently clicked on a banner with the likelihood of this figure jumping to one in 50 in the space of eight weeks - would be shot down in print. Banners may have the innovative edge, but the concrete media statistics remain alarmingly unconvincing, touted one industry observer. According to Mr Alleva, the solution lies in a mindset reversal - and measuring website entries, unique visitors and the reason users came to the site yields the desired specifics. "As users go to a specific search engine, we're able to track that information all through the website, report back to the client on a daily basis and verify the stickiness of the site with pageviews from different users," he said. Arming a campaign with an integrated array of real-world and tech-back-up tactics emerged as the way to go. "An integrated approach to this is critical, not just saying that 'search engines are better than banners', or 'banners are better than bus ads'," Mr Alleva said. Targeting a banner to the right site in fact upped awareness, while putting a site on a search engine boosted its brand cachet. And distinguishing Asia's Internet space from its Stateside uber-cousin, Mr Alleva earmarked "the little guys" - Internet start-ups and advertisers who lacked the luxury of lavish US$20 million adspend budgets. "With a search engine, you actually have the chance of ongoing exposure 24 hours a day, seven days a week - and 98 per cent of us (advertising on the 'Net) are just mere mortals out there," he said. Citing a recent Gartner Group survey on Web merchants, Mr Sweeney noted how the trend for current traffic generation was being shifted offline. "The question then for Web merchants, is how can we minimise the cost of that offline marketing?" The real-world niche guerilla campaigns were, he noted, fast emerging as the most effective dotcom campaigns around. - Further coverage of presentations made at MEDIA's Technology Marketing Seminar will be featured in the April 14 edition. - See also page 22 and 24 in this issue for more on the event.

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