INDUSTRY TIPS: Winning Online - Nielsen Online

The following are some tips, via NielsenWire, about how to market your brand online to create a winning online presence and excellent customer return.

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Winning Online is About Serving Your Audience, not Impressions
March 1, 2010

John Burbank, CEO, Nielsen Online Division

Before joining Nielsen, I spent most of my time as a marketer for major brands. Like many of my peers, I was risk averse when it came to where I put my money — especially online. A “volume, volume, volume” approach of 100 million ad impressions might work for sectors that rely on a direct response model (travel, insurance, etc.), but for brand marketers (auto, CPG, etc.), the focus needs to be more about making a big impression on the right person.

The Advertising Gap
Increasingly, the right place to find your brand’s ideal consumer is online. In the first three quarters of 2009, time spent online grew three percent, and the overall active digital universe is up nearly four percent based on recent figures. But the ad dollars haven’t followed.

For brand marketers to fill the gap created by internet activity vs. internet ad spend they need the confidence that they are not only reaching the right people but also that their advertising has had the desired impact. To get there, we need to convince them of three basic things:

1. Convince them that advertising on the web reaches a desired audience efficiently.
2. Convince them that the advertising message is actually seen and has an impact on the consumer.
3. Convince them that a dollar spent on the web actually pays for itself in offline sales.

This will require a leap away from the impressions and clicks mindset towards a more precise, meaningful and 360 way of measuring brand campaigns. Let’s look at how we make all of this work for brand marketers like me the right way.

Measuring Maximum Reach
WRONG
* 100K impressions were delivered


RIGHT
* Reach – The focus on reach was based on how many of my “custom targets/most valuable customers” actually saw an advertisement?
* Frequency – On average, how many times did my desired audience see the ad?
* Efficiency – Does it cost more or less to do this online versus other media?


Measuring Attitudinal Impact
WRONG
* Measuring Clicks
* Search
* Visits to Website


RIGHT
* Test and Control (Exposed vs. Unexposed)
* Traditional Brand Metrics (How am I performing against my attitudinal goals such as awareness and purchase consideration)
* …all measured against the actual target.

Measuring Sales Impact
WRONG
* Relying on Online sales


RIGHT
* Test and Control (Exposed vs. Unexposed)
* Did I impact sales offline, which is where my customers shop?

Providing Confidence

At Nielsen, we know that getting it right for clients means getting it right with the consumer first. In the last year alone, we’ve expanded online and offline panels and formed unique partnerships that help us better understand what consumers watch (tv, online, mobile) and what they buy. We continue to make significant investments in understanding the consumer by going house to house, mansion to trailer, coast to coast. We taking that deep, diverse demographic intelligence and marry it with data from our 230,000 internet users to project a more focused understanding of the consumer against the entire online population.

We’re also innovating in the area of understanding attitudinal impact. The Nielsen BrandLift product leverages Facebook’s highly engaged (400 million and growing) users.

Finally, our shopper panels and demographic slices are overlaid with TV viewing and online behavior, allowing us to measure both activity and impact across millions of households. Since 2004, we’ve conducted more than 500 studies showing the impact of online campaigns equating to somewhere in the area of $200MM worth of advertising on CPG purchases, and our recent joint venture with Catalina leverages their 50 million shoppers to expertly project ROI of both TV and online ads.

Predictions: Place your ad bets

1. Despite the current gap and economic stagnation, we will see an acceleration in the shift of brand dollars to the web.
Losers: Those publishers who cling to impressions / clicks.
Winners: Those who guarantee the delivery of working mom’s over 40 with two kids, two cars, or whatever their ideal audience is.
2. Marketers will make buys leveraging cross-platform information.
Losers: Those who cannot express value in the wider media context.
Winners: Those who understand their audience and how they use media across TV, Internet and Mobile.
3. Data quality will matter more and more.
Losers: Those data providers whose conclusions fail in-market validation.
Winners: Those who go to the extra effort and expense to deliver reliability.

In short, the future belongs to those who view the web in audience and brand-centric terms and who take full advantage of multi-dimensional brand metrics, across media to better understand what (and how and when) consumers watch and buy. The 360 approach must become the new normal if the advertising community is going to move more brand marketers to invest heavily on the web. The tools exist — it now just takes the willingness to adopt them.

SOURCE: NielsenWire