Early in my career, I heard a very senior executive make the statement “All online marketing is, at its heart, direct marketing” (he was, and is, in direct marketing). Not being in a position where I could challenge this rather bold declaration, I was appalled as I was working rather feverishly on trying to make the case to clients that online could do much, much more. Think about the alternate universe where this same approach applied to offline media. Not that I’m in love with :30s, but if every one of them was a direct TV spot judged by how many people stopped what they were doing, jumped in the car and drove to the store, the TiVo would have been invented in 1972. Similarly magazines would resemble Val-Paks, and newspapers would still be screwed (sorry, couldn’t resist).
In my last post, I went into detail about how the ability of online to measure direct response has had an adverse affect on creativity, consumer acceptance, and even brand priorities. For all intents and purposes, the focus on the click has meant most online marketing has, in fact, become direct response. Two recent articles have crystallized this challenge, and have made very convincing arguments that the click should be sidelined as the be-all-end-all for online. The first is Young-Bean Song’s “Don’t settle for any old ROI” (iMedia) which is packed with stats on how much online advertising works outside the “Last Ad”. The second is Abby Klaassen’s “Why the Click Is the Wrong Metric for Online Ads” (AdAge) which gives an overview of the different industry efforts to create more equitable attribution models for display advertising. Both hinge on reams of data that show multiple messages and exposures build to make a case for the consumer versus a single impulsive click.
They also reference data that show that search ads perform much better when preceded by exposure to display ads, usually to the tune of 20% more traffic. Young-Bean cites a statistic that 72% of all paid search clicks are navigational – brand name or URLs terms – which means that other vehicles have already persuaded the consumer, but search gets all the credit for the action. This gets even more interesting when you take into account all of the various studies that show that consumers are influenced by peer recommendations and blogs at least twice as much as they are by display advertising. Taking this further to say that WOM and social media influences search much more than display advertising is not a stretch, just common sense. There are technical and privacy limitations that prevent us from tracking individual consumer consumption of editorial in the same way as banners, but that shouldn’t prevent us connecting the dots and placing a premium on what consumers already tell us. Looking beyond the last click is long overdue, and will greatly help publishers and agencies. What is needed to help marketers, however, is going the extra step and creating qualitative measures for how editorial and consumers influence each other in the same fashion. The good news is that we have some stuff in the hopper that will potentially do just that. I know that exec was wrong, and I hope I don’t have to wait another 7 years to prove it.