In the beginning, there was the CPM - that enduring measurement of how many thousands of people were exposed to an advertisement as a benchmark for gauging its value. But with the rise of online advertising, CPM impression measurements began to compete with metrics such as Cost Per Click, the number of people who actually used a link on an ad to visit an advertiser's Web site. Here at last was a metric that proved that online advertising really worked - even though relatively few people actually clicked on these ads.
CPMs were great for advertisers, in that they could be assured that their money spent on ads had a measurable result that they could use to negotiate ad rates that corresponded with revenues in some meaningful way. CPMs still figured in to ad budgets, but it was hard to gauge the real effect of online ad impressions compared to leadgen-like CPC results (cut to frowns on faces of ad agency teams everywhere).
Enter the Online Publishers Association, which has released a new research study conducted by comScore of how consumers respond to online display advertising from 80 major brand campaigns running on 200 major media sites. The study measured the behavior of consumers after having been exposed to online display ads when searching for a brand trademark, traffic improvements on their Web sites and the amount of ecommerce. An OPA slide deck available at Silicon Valley Insider depcits some of the key stats from this study.
The results of the study are quite rosy: about 18 percent of the surveyed consumers searched on the advertised brand within a month period, 29 percent visited the Web sites for those brands, they spent 55 percent more time on pages at that site, clicked on 51 percent more pages and spent more on ecommerce options when available. The overall ecommerce increase was about 7 percent, spanning sectors such as autos and finance as well as others, but when looking at consumer packaged goods the uptick in ecommerce attributed to display ads was 14 percent, with consumer electronics increasing 22 percent (Cue broad smiles at ad agencies everywhere).
Clearly this is good news for media companies looking to transition from print revenues gained from impression-based brand advertising to online markets, as well as for advertisers (and, of course, for comScore, which can sell more research of this kind). Advertising benefits from "hang time" with eyeballs, not always correlating to those nifty eye-movement-scanning human factors tests which imply that nobody's paying attention to ads. The peripheral vision of humans picks up and processes far more than we may imagine, it would seem. The problem, though, is that it's not only ads in major media outlets that are claiming a benefit from this effect - and the comScore research is not the only game in town.
It turns out that Google has also been looking at the value of ad impressions relating to its own content and advertising. As related in B-to-B Online by Sam Sebastian, director of local and B2B markets at Google, a study for General Electric conducted by Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing firm, revealed that contextual text-based ads appearing in search results also had a positive effect on brand recall. In other words, there is more than one way to skin the brand cat - and many outlets for advertisers to consider.
Moreover, as Google's own research indicated, 64 percent of C-level executives from Forbes 500 companies surveyed in their own research were using search at least six times a day themselves to locate business information. So not only is the potential for commerce to be gained from ad impressions not the exclusive domain of traditional media outlets, but it appears that many of the prime decision-makers with budgets are turning to search engines first oftentimes to get the impressions of products and services that they need. The presumption that print is a medium for the elites that many brands seek out as opinion-makers is still valid, but breaking down rapidly.
While the Google and Enquiro research doesn't refute the comScore study, it's a reminder that there are many contexts that advertisers need to think about how to convey brand value - including social media outlets and other venues beyond search engines and publishers' portals. All of this research seems to point out that advertising for brand value still matters in online outlets, even though its payback is challenged by new methodologies. Social media in particular offers a very high ratio on payback in brand investment, even though it does not provide in many instances the mass-scale impact that traditional advertising campaigns deliver.
One interesting example of the power of social media for brand marketers told by David Binkowski, Director of Word of Mouth Marketing at MS&L Worldwide, at a recent meeting of the Social Media Club in New York City, underscored the point that return on investment can still be very different in online venues even when brand impressions count. Binkowski relayed how the manufacturers of the heartburn medication Prilosec had spent big on an advertising campaign to give away tickets for a Super Bowl game one year, but then tried using social media and other Web outlets the next year for their ticket giveaway, spending about one tenth as much in the process. Interestingly, the net results from these two campaigns were about the same. So while everyone can feel good about impression-based advertising working in both traditional and new online outlets, advertising alone is no longer the only game in town for contextualizing brands online.
The good news in all of this, though, is that brands can survive and thrive online when they are using the right tools and putting down their chips appropriately. Traditional media is certainly a big part of that mix, but it's not the only game in town any more. A good page of search results that solves a very focused problem for someone can be a valuable opportunity for a brand to claim some space as a part of that solution. This has to temper enthusiasm for the OPA study somewhat as a tool to increase CPMs based on the value of impressions, but the ability of services such as comScore to quantify ROI on impression-based online advertising may help to give ad agencies a boost in their efforts to benefit more broadly from the switch to digital outlets for marketing.
The ROI value of social media as a tool for brand building is powerful in theory, but the metrics on its performance are still a work in progress and not yet accepted widely in marketing circles. This can be expected to change fairly rapidly, as underscored by a presentation by Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer for comScore, at that same Social Media Club meeting. With services such as comScore beginning to put the finger on the pulse of cross-platform consumer behavior, marketers are entering a period in which the mysteries of unlocking ROI from online promotions and advertising are unfolding rapidly. Any way you look at it, there's a lot more "stickiness" for brands online than we may have thought previously - and a lot more reasons for marketers to push the limits of what can be done with brand marketing in online environments that much harder.
Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come along only so often. As I settled in to my train seat on the way home, I noticed that my friend Jim Hirshfield was sitting in the seat behind me. Jim and I had last seen one another at last year's Cluetrain@10 celebration in New York City, just as he was looking to re-enter the startup space. Today Jim is VP of Business Development of Zemanta, a European startup with development offices in Slovenia that has developed a nifty platform that enables publishers to enrich their online content via their semantic language processing tools.
Zemanta technology operates via a plugin for popular blogging and Web CMS platforms and with popular brower-based email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As with other semantic processing services that parse documents to suggest related links, tags and content, Zemanta semantic processing technology pumps text that's being typed in by a document author through its semantic filters to come up with relevant rich content that can be inserted into these documents. This in and of itself is not terribly revolutionary: publishing platforms have had similar tools for years to facilitate the development of rich content that can attract search engine traffic and keep audiences engaged in their content. What's highly interesting about Zemanta's approach is that it is a free download that can be integrated within seconds into platforms that are popular with both bloggers and professional publishers. A "pro" model is available that can be tailored for a publisher's own content on their own platforms.
Best of all, the stuff just plain works. As you type along, Zemanta's suggestions for images, links, tagging and related content pop up in convenient spots near a page's editing window. This real-time analysis is quite impressive and remarkably effective: it seems to take only a few sentences to get going and it gets only better as you type in more. A quick click or drag of the mouse and rich content is integrated into a blog post or article easily. It's giddily easy to enrich your articles: virtually every link, image and tag in this article was implemented with Zemanta. Zemanta's free download links into 10 million-plus items of content from free sources, including rights-cleared images from sources such as CrunchBase, Flickr and Google Maps, articles from key bloggers and Wikipedia as well as information posted on social networking services and content from Crunchbase, Amazon, YouTube and other popular sources. "Reblogging" content to other sites with trace linking to the original source is applied automatically to each post.
High-end services may provide more features, content and functionality for semantic content integration, but for publishers that don't have the time, money or project bandwidth for such solutions and that need to get more enriched content quickly Zemanta offers remarkable power in its free version - as well as the ability to upgrade to the premium version that enables publisher-specific sources to be integrated easily as well. This can be particularly important for a publisher that may have blogging or open-source CMS platforms that will not be so easily integrated into some of the high end semantic services. Zemanta allows these publishers to make rapid integration of content from their existing sources a very short project. In a world in which publishing platforms with 80 percent of what one would expect from a professional package now dominate the bulk of content being generated on the Web, Zemanta gives those platforms yet another "pretty-darn-good" asset that can help their content to compete effectively in online content markets. My thanks to Jim for being in the right place at the right time with a great tool for publishers of all sizes.
The Social Media Club is a growing network of social media enthusiasts from many different walks of life, including both the commercially-oriented online crowd as well as academics focusing on media studies. I was invited to speak on a panel for their April Boston area meeting a couple of months ago and so I found myself braving cats-and-dogs rain to join the group in Dedham, Massachussets last night along with other hardy New Englanders. The panel consisted of myself, Judith Perrolle of Northeastern University and Douglas Quintal of Emerson College considering the question of whether the bomb scare in Boston earlier this year triggered by a promotion for the Cartoon Network may have implications for social media.
The short answer was: not really. This was a stunt by a mainstream media company that was using well-established "guerrilla marketing" techniques across the nation to put out a message on portable electronic displays - which in Boston were placed near and under key infrastructure points. Someone implied that perhaps backhandedly the promoters knew that this might get a rise out of the authorities - or that perhaps they even brought it to their attention. Who knows. The bottom line is that the City of Boston was not consulted, and in general good citizens try to keep the protectors of community interests in the loop. By contrast, social media is all about sharing communal interests and self-policing of boundaries of conduct by community members. In a sense social media is the exact opposite of guerilla marketing: since individuals already have access to powerful tools to create and contextualize content mainstream marketers come to their content to get into the communal flow of things. I think that Judith Perrolle hit the nail on the head when she characterized the ill-fated Cartoon Network campaign as "solid-state spam."
But on the other side of the incident are the younger people who looked at the reaction in Boston and said "They don't get it." That's certainly valid from the perspective of the younger target audience for the Cartoon Network - we all know that if your parents get something it must not be "cool" - but it's also a sign of people who have come to accept that commercial messages can appear anywhere. Social media tends to extend this concept by its ability to make it easy for webloggers and other personal publishers to embed ads on their sites as well as content from other sites. For younger people this is kind of an extension to the logo-laden clothing and accessories that are pervasive in our culture: they "wear"brands on their content the way that they do going to school. So to them seeing the Cartoon Network or any other brand in a public space is not that big a deal. Social media, though, is not really the cause of this, just an extension of a pre-existing branded culture.
But as social media matures I believe that people will become more sensitized to how they are using their personal brands cultivated via their social media persona to endorse other brands in personal and public spaces. Kids - and many adults - are beginning to understand more clearly when people are using advertising to support a personal and community function without prejudice and when the advertising is tainting a person's online persona. Doug Quintal pointed to research of 2,500 young people which indicates that the stereotype of social media enthusiasts as loners/losers does not pan out statistically: their use of social media is pervasive, with the proportion of loner/loser personalities in virtual spaces being about the same as in the real world. So as social media becomes more pervasive marketers are going to have to be increasingly sensitive as to how to present messages more authentically as participants in social media communities rather than as mere commercial wallpaper. Authenticity counts in social media more than artificial "underground" marketing.
This was a fun group that stimulated a lot of thought-provoking discussion about social media and its impact on how we are communicating with one another. I may have second thoughts about taking another long slog through pouring rain to get to the Boston meetings but I look forward to other Social Media Club events in the future.
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