Fishing Where the Fish Are

Lately, it seems like every industry newsletter, report or article that I read is talking about the impact of the recession on online advertising. I was particularly struck by one last week in Adotas, which followed an interesting tangent about why we, as employees, shouldn’t be worried. Setting aside the level of job security comfort Tom Chapman provided, it was equally refreshing to note the two key reasons cited for why we should feel great about our future – accountability and effectiveness.

We’ve known since the outset that the key differentiator for online advertising has been accountability. You want a quantifiable measure of ROI for an ad program? No other channel can provide that data with the level of granularity that we can. The availability of high volume, low cost tools like search and display networks greatly facilitates that cause.

Effectiveness? Well, defining that as a USP for online advertising has proven to be more of a challenge. How do we, as an industry, clearly elucidate that we’re spending ad dollars more “effectively,” regardless of success metric, than other mediums?

I’ve heard repeatedly from clients that they’d like to shift more budget to online, but moving those dollars away from traditional channels is “scary.” The core of that argument is effectiveness. They “feel good” about the awareness impact of their offline buys, and traditional agencies will throw plenty of survey data at them to verify the effectiveness of those spots and pages in growing brand loyalty and inspiring purchase intent. Clients are comfortable with these mediums, and content to believe the ancient arguments that offline will use to justify their excessive share of media budget. It’s our job to challenge that comfort with hard data that demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiencies that we can achieve online.

The opportunity here goes back to the age-old maxim of “fishing where the fish are.” If you want to be effective in inspiring awareness and action, you need to find the right audience at the right moment with the right message. Find your sweet spots, minimize impression waste, present a compelling offer, and guess what? You’re effective. Where else can you find exactly who you want to speak to, in exactly the right context, other than online?

Right now is the opportunity for us to win the effectiveness argument for good. With shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny, if we don’t seize the channel leadership driver’s seat, we will continue to be relegated to the backseat until the recession ends and budgets begin to grow again.

We can target audiences with extreme granularity in terms of demographics, contextual relevance and exhibited behavior. The problem is, many of the clients that we’re dealing with don’t know how rich those capabilities are. Educate them. Show them that demographic and behavioral targeting aren’t mutually exclusive. Teach them about smart ads, or the latest advances in portal behavioral targeting. Explain to them the benefits of the natural marriage of search and pixel retargeting. (This last one continues to amaze me, you’ll note that this article is from 2006, and yet 75+ percent of the time I use the term “pixel retargeting” with clients and prospects, I’m met with blank stares!)

Good luck to all of us. Oh, and if you comment back and I don’t respond right away, I apologize in advance. I’m going fishin’.