Guest comment: Online advertising grows up

Online advertising is finally coming of age, with firms becoming savvy in delivering effective brand messaging over the web. But as budgets shift to digital, Ben Humphry, Country Director UK and Ireland at nugg.ad looks at the remaining barriers preventing the medium from reaching its potential.


Recent data indicates that online advertising in the UK has grown to 25% of all media spend, roughly in line with media consumption. This is a pivotal milestone, especially for those of us who remember the struggle to reach 5%.
Back then, online advertising tended to be considered the Wild West; an interesting but scary place, worthy of bit of an experiment amongst the most pioneering or foolhardy advertisers.
Obviously times have moved on, and the more complacent among us might think that the industry can finally begin to be considered mature. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s clear there are still barriers preventing specific types of budget from wholeheartedly embracing online.
Online remains almost exclusively used as a performance platform, where its measurability and interactivity create a compelling opportunity. Brand advertising online is stuck in that 5% world. For brand marketers, online is still the ‘Wild West’.
Unlike other media, there are no industry standards to target and measure audience reach. Brand campaign goals are measured in brand recognition, brand affinity and intent to purchase, not clicks or impressions. Linger time, likes and followers are being used as dubious proxies.
So how should a marketer reach the right audience, and how can they measure the impact of their message in an efficient and clear manner? Only when the industry has a complete and consistent answer to this question should we be ready to declare ourselves as a mature industry.
Reaching the right audience is an area that is improving rapidly. Data is the key and the internet has a lot of it! Acquiring online data allows brands to reach audiences fitting specific socio-demographic criteria for a campaign.
The challenge, however, is that data coverage is not universal, so this still only addresses part of the whole potential audience. With any sought-after demographic, the portion of the audience that can be identified becomes highly valuable, whereas the rest of the audience is considered low value, even though it undoubtedly contains people who meet the same criteria. The story is similar with social media – a brand can address their followers, but will be missing a much bigger audience who fit the profile, but haven’t chosen to follow the brand.
As an industry, we should think more in terms of television’s Target Ratings Points, understanding not just the target audience, but what portion of that audience a campaign reaches. Moreover, it’s a phrase that is universal and already used by marketers. This is an important metric that needs to become part of the standard currency of online advertising.
Online and mobile media owners who offer predictive behavioural targeting allow brands to make use of the data they have and extrapolate it across a broad audience, identifying a greater proportion of their target audience than they might otherwise have been able to. Both TRP and high value inventory are increased.
So now we can reach an audience, how do we assess the impact of the campaign? What measures should we use to understand brand recognition, brand affinity and intent to purchase?
In reality, there are no proxies, no similar measures that can be applied. How a consumer feels about something is, by definition, internal. Measuring a click online is easy when the click is physical, but not when it occurs in a consumer’s mind.
Other media, of course, have the same restriction, but the typical solution – a post campaign panel interview – is at odds with online’s measurability and immediacy. Luckily, there have been advances here, too, and we can accurately measure the impact of campaigns in terms of brand recognition, affinity and purchase intent, dynamically, within the campaigns themselves.
With online surpassing television as the most consumed of all media it’s set to be a great environment for brand advertising. Via the online route messages can be delivered in dynamic and interactive ways; and thanks to recent advances, it can now also be delivered to a large relevant audience and measured accurately and immediately against brand objectives. As this becomes more standard across media owners, finally we’ll be ready to celebrate another pivotal milestone; the day that online advertising truly grew up and became a brand medium.
By Ben Humphry
Country Director UK and Ireland
nugg.ad
http://www.nugg.ad/en/