Dan Calladine - DanCall on twitter, Research Director at Isobar

Your idea about the perfect working day:  I always start early, partly because I’m naturally an early bird, and partly because the Northern Line is hell after 8am.  I check emails, then, assuming there are no emergencies, get onto the day’s scheduled tasks.  I sit just across from my colleague Alexis Moore, and we usually share a lot of ideas and strange things we find online by IM over the course of the day.  We both love finding new things, or examples that will make concepts like social media come to life, so this is often great fun.  We also have media owners and technology companies coming in to show us interesting new things, and the best days are the ones when we see really new, innovative things either online or in meetings. 

Your muse best comes when: It can come at any time, but it’s usually things that I see that set off chains of thought, either as links that friends and colleagues send through, things I see via twitter, or things on my favourite site Metafilter – http://www.metafilter.com/

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?  In the digital world things need to be entertaining and useful.  People are very good at avoiding advertising, so advertising has to be something that you would choose to spend time with, or interact with.

Favorite Brand Experience:  The MSN takeover for Madagascar II – it was intrusive, but the user chose to let it intrude.  It was also the first time I’d seen a takeover take a page over in such a comprehensive way.

How will digital advertising be affected by the recession?  Firms advertise to attract customers.  If the customers have less money then inevitably advertising becomes less attractive, but at the same time advertising that does run needs to be much more accountable and effective.  The recession will increase the focus on ROI, effectiveness, engagement and proven success.  Digital media can generally show this better than other media, so digital media will win budgets from other channels.

If you ever ran advertising campaigns across different channels (TV, print, online, mobile etc) then you probably wanted to analyze them together and really understand how the different channels impact each other. But our guess is you weren’t able to do so. We’re happy to announce that those days are gone. Today you can make a first step towards that goal by holistically analyzing your search and display campaigns. Curious to know what and how? Then read on…

Holistic campaign analysis across search and display campaigns has two key components: path to conversion analysis and cross channel synergies. The first component, path to conversion analysis, requires you to neglect the last ad or last click conversion attribution methods and start assessing all the branding events in the consumer pathway that you have overlooked so far. The last ad or last click methods are flawed and artificial since it’s clear that each consumer’s exposure to an ad (whether it happens offline or online) has some level of contribution to the consumer’s conversion at the end of the path. If you have the consumer’s path to conversion data, then don’t settle on the last ad or last click methods just because it’s easy and quick. If you don’t have that data, then go and get it.

Got it?  For the next step, click here to download the full marketing note on cross channel campaign analysis.

Ronnie Lavi | Manager, Product Planning and Business Development