Show me The “Brand” Money
Jorge Espinel / July 11, 2008
I recently came across an interview given by former head of Ad Sales Wenda Harris Millard (see Here) which outlines some of the issues that I see in the online ad industry today — particularly around the push to shift “brand” advertising spending to the Internet and away from Television and print.
- The online ad infrastructure on the Web is being built around performance advertising - Think paid search, performance display ad networks, marketplaces.
- New products such as behavioral and contextual targeting appear to be used more for enhancing display advertising performance than improving the online’s value proposition for brand advertisers.
- Large online networks seem to be de-emphasizing their efforts to offer integrated brand campaigns given their zealot focus on systems-driven solutions for advertisers.
- Ad innovation is taking place at many startups which is great but is doing little to establish scalable solutions for advertisers
Brand marketers are demanding innovative campaign solutions for their brands which offer two key things:
- A unique value proposition, different from TV or print. Display ads next to “relevant” content is not the answer. TV and print already offer that. The Web can offer truly multi-media campaigns.
- Deliver better engagement than other media. TV is quickly losing points on engagement with marketers as people increasingly skip ads using DVRs or simply their remote controls. Please note that click-throughs does not mean engagement. Web is a great medium to drive customer participation and the solutions offered to campaign marketers should offer ways for customers to “engage” with brand experiences.
If as an industry, we are able to deliver on these two things, we will start to see brand marketers more quickly embrace the medium. Publishers will start to see higher CPMs…at scale.
Millard’s comments suggest we are still not heading in this direction. What do you think?
