Dougherty’s description came as part of a pop-culture-focused panel called "Chasing Paid Engagement," led by Mike Darviche, a board member for Networked Insights, late this morning.

Oprah’s site ranked highest on ‘inspirational’ and ‘life-enhancing,’ but when it comes to ad receptivity, foodnetwork.com more than holds its own. Ms. Dougherty showed that during the lead-up to Thanksgiving – which she called “the Super Bowl of eating” — foodnetwork.com visitors look for a whole lot of Swanson broth.

Darviche had kicked off the pop-culture theme by showing the way SocialSenseTV, a Networked Insights platform, measured the ripple effect of ads targeting the social-media chatter around “The Simpsons.” Darviche claimed that such placement provides a $10 million lift to brands who engage that way. He also said that an iPad product placement on the show “Modern Family” had resulted in marketing value of $2.5 million — a good deal more than Apple had paid to place the device in the show.

ScanScout’s Jason Krebs demonstrated the way his company’s interactive technology had strengthened Jeep’s video pre-roll. Krebs said “Jeep doesn’t care about fluff” — i.e., traditional measures of engagement such as click-through rates. Rather, all they want to know is, are they raising awareness vis-à-vis their competition. Given Jeep’s willingness to have its case talked about onstage, it will come as little surprise that the answer was a resounding ‘yes.’ One notable finding: Krebs said, “People wring their hands about 30-second ads versus 15 seconds. But the dropoff rates are almost identical.” A graph reinforced his point; the dropoff rates for :30 were barely distinguishable from the rates for :15 pre-roll.

Back to TV, John Lowell of Starcom warned listeners that “a program that’s highly engaging may be a great place to advertise, and may be an awful place to advertise.” An irrelevant ad may be worse than no ad at all if viewers are particularly engaged, he explained. High levels of engagement lead viewers to expect similarly engaging ads, and if they don’t get them, they may feel more negatively toward the product than they had before they ever saw the ad.

In 2008, US measured media was $280 billion, of which $254 billion was offline and $26 billion online.  73% of offline media was brand marketing whereas online, direct response marketing was 76% of the mix.  Part of the skew is attributable to the measurability of direct response, particularly online, and the difficulty of measuring brand marketing.

Connecting online ads to offline purchases is difficult at best.  Comscore published a white paper in 2008 on the dramatic underestimation of display advertising ROI, primarily the result of the fact that any assessment of less tangible brand marketing is qualitative and after the fact.

Online has been held to higher standards than traditional, because everything is measured, and probably because we still need to prove the value of online for branding.  In the past few years we’ve made great strides to prove the efficacy of digital advertising on the consumer funnel.  According to the panelists, we’ve reached a threshold and there are now good technologies that can help us measure.  However, the truth is it’s still difficult to connect the dots between online ads and offline purchases.

The mix on this panel was interesting: one marketer (Andy Markowitz of Kraft), two agencies (Carl Fremont of Digitas and Richard Guest of Tribal DDB) and two technology companies (Dan Beltramo of Vizu and Andy Atherton of brand.net which claim to provide tools to help read the tea leaves).

I’ll confess that I usually put more weight on what a marketer says.  Kraft has been engaged in online for a long time, and they have lots of measurements from soft to hard ROI metrics.  According to Andy Markowitz, the only constant has been this: there’s only tolerance for what sells more product: the old saw of “the proof is in the pudding”.

Online brand campaigns and offline-style extrapolated measurements lead to suspicion and mistrust, as well as fears of inaccurate sampling which make brand marketing an easy budget-cutting target.  Most marketers think about online brand campaigns as a murky immeasurable necessity.  Can we use new technology to close the gap and measure online brand advertising ROI?  Can we directly attribute sales lift or brand lift to the online campaign?

The problem is that the online content environment is very fragmented.  Efficient tools have been developed to run direct response campaigns online but there are no (or few) efficient tools to run branding campaigns online.  There are platforms out there but they are complicated and not well developed.  The challenge is to “operationalize” the efficiency of things like multivariate testing, that is to make the analysis routine and embedded in the process.

The numbers are somewhat misleading since the direct response portion is driven by search and not necessarily display advertising.  There are still a lot of marketers who are not convinced of the efficacy of brand advertising online, and some technologies are being developed.  But the bottom line is, it’s still very qualitative.

Consumers don’t understand the difference between “direct response” and “brand”.  The data suggests that on average the offline sales lift vs. online spending is 140%.  The good news is that with digital, we are starting to have the ability to read the effects in real time, even with the tools we have now.  This means you can see your campaign results in days or weeks instead of months, and adjust accordingly.

The key to doing this right is what panelist Carl Fremont of Digitas calls “closed loop marketing”.  It’s all got to be integrated, the old-fashioned well-structured marketing mix, something I’ve been preaching for more than 10 years…  Maybe I can finally stop feeling like a modern-day Cassandra.

Interactive marketing has long sold itself on the promise of accountability and ROI measurement. Yet, at the same time there continues to be challenges in solving John Wanamaker’s problem: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Indeed, the common analytics tracking for online marketing campaigns are simplistic at best. It cannot measure how display ads (seen as branding) can impact search (used mostly for sales). Nor can most analytics tracking attribute the multiple searches and visits a person did that ultimately led to a purchase (See image above).

Enter Havas Digital and Yahoo. Their panel, Search + Display—Moving Beyond the Brand vs. Direct Response Model, not only showcased Havas Digital’s solution to this question but show great case studies of the insight and optimizations gained from a better and more true multi-channel analytics. (Note: all of the images in this post was taken by the Havas Digita/Yahoo PowerPoint presented at ad:tech)

MODERATOR:
Rich LeFurgy, General Partner, Archer Advisors

PANELISTS:
Dan Boberg, VP, Advertiser & Agency Professional Services, Yahoo!
Ed Montes, Executive VP, Managing Director US, Havas Digital US

The Promise for Advance Attribution in Analytics
The benefit of building a system that can do sophisticated attribution tracking lies in being able to track what are known marketing truths but have been difficult to readily measure:

1. Display (Brand) Supports Search (Sales)
There has been countless studies revealing that running display banners, which may or may not have been clicked on, increasing searches for the brand and eventually in to sales. As far as data go, the panelists quote two of the most often cited statistics on the matter:

1. Display + Search Provides Improved Branding
“Exposure to a display advertisement increased related trademark term searches (brand, company or product names) by an average of 26 percent” - Yahoo/ComScore study of Fortune 100 advertisers, “Close the Loop: Understanding Search and Display Synergy”
2. Display + Search Provides Higher ROI
“Users exposed to both search and display ads convert at a higher rate: 22% better than search alone, and 400% better than display only.” – The Atlas Institute, “The combined impact of Search and Display advertising – Why advertisers should measure across channels”

Having an attribution system that can readily attribute how much a display campaign drove search ROI would shift our perception for display as “just” a branding tool.

2. Tracking Beyond the Final Click
By default, most analytics systems attribute sale to the last link the customer clicks on. It completely ignores the fact that people may conduct multiple searches and clicks to a ecommerce website before than actually make a purchase.

All marketers know that the “last click” is not correct. If a search marketer blindly believed in the “last click” and on strict ROI measurement, we would all just bid on our branded terms and go home.

Case Studies
Working with Yahoo, Havas Digital did build such an attribution system that would help track the two issues above. Havas Digital and Yahoo presented several case studies on the system, called Armetis. Here are slides from a few of their case studies.

Case Study #1: When display drives sales-based ROI…for other campaigns

The above is a case study from an automobile manufacturer. While sponsored search drove the most “last click” conversion, the entire marketing picture shows that display advertising assisted in the conversion of 163 visitors. So scaling back down display advertising dollars may, in fact, cause lower sales for other marketing channels like search.

Case Study #2: Why some highly converting keywords cannot stand alone

From the above report, Campaign 2 seems to be both costly at a cost per conversion of $422 and one lowest leads performer. However by looking at search assist, we see it has been drive in assisting in leads for other campaigns. Without such data, a search marketer may have been too eager to kill campaign #2, yet end up driving lower leads for other search campaigns.

Closing Thoghts
While Havas Digital’s Artemis attribution system looks very impressive, there is no such thing as a perfect tracking solution. As the panelists pointed out, there are still large limitations based on the fact that users delete cookies and that cookies need to last (and survive) more than 90 days in order for tracking systems to properly attribute the multiple exposures and clicks that lead to a conversion. Then of course, comes the more complicated questions of how to weigh how far back can a banner show to user “claim” to have assisted in driving a sales one, two or five months later. The joke the panelists mentioned that one flaw is an agency could blanket the entire web with display banners and then claim “attribution” for any sale that happens there after.

In end, however, we do need tools like these to really optimize campaign and paint an ever more accurate picture of what really drives engagement and sales. Yet even the tool described here by both Havas and Yahoo were noted by both companies as still rough and far from complete. Indeed, the quest for ever better analysis is an interesting problem to me; I plan to write a follow-up to this soon on my own blog at Emergence-Media.com.

Measuring digital is hot right now and it was standing room only at the Media Boot Camp Power Session: Defining the New Media Currency – How to bring traditional media metrics online.

Moderator:
David Smith, CEO Mediasmith
Panelists:
Jon Gibs VP Media Analytics, Nielson Online
Erin Hunter Executive VP, comScore
Young-Bean Song Director of Analytics & Atlas Institute, Microsoft
Scott Ernst President, Compete
Todd Teresi, Chief Revenue Officer, Quantcast

There is a pretty big delta between the amount of time, energy and engagement that people have online and the amount of money that marketers are spending online. One of the barriers is understanding how to track and measure online spending to show results.

So what are some options for measuring?
Virtual Panel – Create a virtual panel to assess the effectiveness of your online campaign. Use survey methods similar to traditional methods used for measuring the impact of TV and print.
Split Testing – Serve different ads to different people and measure the effectiveness of each ad in driving action from your target. Rotate ads and creative to optimize your spending.
Search Data – Analyze search data to find out what people are searching for online. Are you seeing an increase in searches for your brand or terms related to your brand? Are there searches related to your campaign? Search is a great real-time way to understand what is actually going on in the space.
Online Buzz – Measure online buzz – use services to track the number of mentions and sentiment of mentions about your brand. Online buzz gives you an immediate read on whether or not your campaign is inspiring conversations. You can get results quicker and cheaper than traditional methods and make adjustments as needed.
Target - Evaluate whether or not you are connecting with the right target. Poor results may stem from reaching the wrong audience online. Understand who you are trying to reach and where they are online.

So what should I measure?
The first generation of measure was click-through. The second generation was action taken directly related to the ad – how many people took a specific action after clicking on an ad? The third is attribution measurement; looking at the meaning and importance of the integrated campaign – how does each portion of the campaign help lead to purchase.

The base question is “Can you reach the right people and get them to do something?”

Ask yourself, “Does my campaign create awareness in a new way that I can measure online?” Ask the same questions that you do offline – measure persuasiveness of the campaign via surveys, DynamicLogic, InsideExpress. Leverage the web for what it is good at – are people buzzing/talking about your brand, are they searching for your brand, are they visiting your website? Leverage social media to look for conversations about your brand – these measures can be more powerful than traditional measures.

Just because you Can doesn’t mean you Should
Select measures that are relevant to the actions that you are trying to drive online. Be sure that your measures tie back to the objectives of your campaign. Look for ways to measure the impact of integrating digital into the rest of your marketing mix.