Advertising: the facts

Before I joined Foviance, I worked in advertising for eight years. My career took me through three of the top five agencies in the world. In the early days, the focus was on TV, press and radio campaigns. Today, agencies must understand online advertising if they are to survive. It’s a cut-throat industry, and a poorly executed online campaign could cost the agency the whole account.

There’s an adage in advertising that only 10% of a campaign is effective, you just don’t know which 10%. With everything being measurable online, that doesn’t necessarily hold any more. If the campaign is a branding exercise, online surveys can be used to assess its impact. But if you’re looking for click-throughs, you can easily see who’s arrived and where they’re coming from. It’s also cost effective test the performance of an online advert and refine its design or placement before launching the full campaign. Online advertising plays by different rules to offline campaigns, and clients increasingly expect to be able to measure a campaign in minute detail. Agencies that don’t use sophisticated analytics won’t be able to compete.

The complexity of online adverts is increasing. Some are like mini-websites or catalogues, embedded in the host page. For now, their novelty attracts interaction. Once they’re part of the furniture, customers will only keep clicking on them if they’re useful and intuitive. During 2007, we expect agencies to engage in more pre-testing of adverts (whether for usability or impact). While the metrics will show them who’s clicking and when, it’s only through usability testing that they can truly understand why. More importantly, usability testing will identify where campaigns fail and create opportunities to improve them.

I expect to see multichannel campaigns getting smarter this year. It’s an old direct marketing trick to use vanity codes to show where new enquiries come from. Few have taken this technique online: if everyone’s arriving at the same page, how can you tell which campaign generated the lead? Advertisers should use deep links in their offline advertising to drive people to different pages, so they can measure the impact of every ad.

The level of measurability online will scare some agencies: those who can’t deliver results. But the good agencies will be able to use analytics to demonstrate their worth and ensure campaigns deliver a return on investment. It’s time to look beyond just those who convert – you can also look at those that don’t and identify the reason why. And that is a whole world of untapped value.