How much would you pay to target one of your prospective customers? While this question resonates immediately with search marketers, it is still vague for display advertisers. Nowadays, with audience buying platforms, this question becomes more and more relevant than before. This was one of the questions discussed at OMMA Measurement this week in New York.

“There is a disconnect with traditional marketers, where the value of data comes from its scarcity rather than the quality of it,” says Adam Gerber, the Chief Marketing Officer of Quantcast. “Online, every target has cost per lead, cost per impression, so they need to think whether it has the ROI to pay for the data. Marketers need to see if the cost of the data makes business sense in the value that it brings. There is a difference between a one dollar chocolate bar and a car.”


“We can all buy data, and pay a price, but the question is about the value,” said Darren Herman, President of Varick Media Management. “You need to know what you pay and what you get in return.”
While there is the question of the quality of data, it’s more dependent on price. If the data generates conversions or leads in a cost that makes business sense, low cost low quality data may be valuable. “There is no bad data, just bad price,” concluded Greg Skipper, Director of Networks Strategy at Advertising.com.


According to Mr. Gerber, the thinking around value creation is what makes big businesses. In Search, advertisers price the click and see if it fits into the business model, while in display advertising it doesn’t work this way yet. The members of the panel agreed that it is necessary to take steps in this direction, where marketers look at advertising ROI.


Nevertheless, there is another dimension that comes after you have reached your target audience—engagement. “Engagement is like obscenity,” said Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer at comScore. “It’s hard to define it, but I know it when I see it.” Engagement is the third dimension beyond reach and frequency. The main issue is that in offline advertising there is no engagement, so it is still in its infancy.

Mr. Gerber thinks that while marketers and advertisers are focused on using data for targeting—getting the best audience to target—they can also use data to create relevant ads. He also believes that engagement is created when the creative is relevant and data can be used to serve more relevant ads.


Ariel Geifman, Research Analyst attending OMMA Measurement

We are pleased to bring you a post by Guest Contributor Martin Meyer-Gossner from The Strategy Web.


Display advertising is the oldest form of online advertising. For years, creative intelligence used big ad space and numerous formats to deliver best possible brand awareness. Display advertising was the no. 1 in online marketing, and seen as THE key in the generation of customer engagement in the Web 1.0 era. Having banner blindness and bad conversion in the back of their heads, all marketers ask, how to create effective online ads to promote company promotions. And ideally these banners should find the engagement economy and generate leads for the businesses.

In today’s social web world, display advertising should have two faces (not only because Facebook won’t sell traditional banners any longer): one for awareness and one for engagement generation campaigns. And for the latter, display advertising faces a tough competitor these days: ads in social networks.

Does this mean social networks have invented a new form of engagement advertising? No – but the philosophy around engagement bannering is changing with their appearance. A question of our clients is: Is the simple creation of a banner with user-centric usability responsible for the road to successful banner campaigns?

In 2000, the silicon business model launched with a product called the “Response Banner” (see reproduced version, left) which carried nearly all call-to-action elements of the Facebook Engagement Ads (right): small picture, offer, call-to-action sentence, a button – click! Knowing how successful these ads performed, I can estimate the success of Facebook engagement ads filling the sales funnel of advertisers with “fans” (not to mention potential customers!).

The Facebook banner intelligence follows our old response banner approach. From a user perspective, the barrier for a user to get engaged with the advertising company is the landing page, obviously the data registration process. This philosophy can be backed by a study showing that in-banner ads generate better lead results than on-site campaigns. Less steps for the user create more conversion.
Community banner ads can be far more intelligent than traditional ones. The creative is connected with the community- database. Thus, it is easy to understand and to use for the community members. Plus, it delivers great community service. And the banners have great brand recognition value – they all look alike and just the text varies.

If the registration process is pre-organized, the user accepts the data registration much quicker, more often and again and again. It is just one click! Facebook offers this “one-click-makes-customers-happy-service”. And I am sure we will see other social networks learning from this case.

Knowing that recommendation marketing through peers is essential for business success in the future, Facebook ads are even cleverer. They carry a recommendation element which lets us know who of our peers has already interacted with the banner. For months, I have been asking myself why we don’t see companies and their agencies placing traditional banners with recommendation elements…

Spot On!

Many posts or books have been written about the essential creative elements of banners. We will still need traditional colorful and flashy banners that cause emotions – but for awareness campaigns! Engagement bannering is different, and it can be quite simple as we have seen, right?

Now, just imagine every person had one easy manageable individual landing page which they can personalize from campaign to campaign, from network to network, from community to community – just by using Facebook-, Google- or Twitter Connect?

Welcome, new engagement advertising philosophy…

Martin Meyer-Gossner is sales and marketing expert and co-founder of the IT B2B platform silicon.de. With his social business brand The Strategy Web Martin helps business decision makers to understand what a modern (web) business strategy needs and how to provide top customer service in the future.

Eyeblaster CEO and Co-Founder Gal Trifon was recently interviewed by Laurie Sullivan in OMMA Magazine. He describes the significant investment made to develop MediaMind by Eyeblaster and bring it to market. Click here to read the full interview in MediaPost.

As part of our Favorite Brand Experience series, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Soichiro Nishigaki, Creative Director at Fallon Tokyo.

Your idea about the perfect working day?
The perfect working day to me would be to start with riding a bicycle with my iPod on a brilliantly sunny morning. If my loving iPod shuffles to give me songs of Dave Matthews Band, it would be perfect! At the office, no meeting in my calendar, being creative, leaving office around 6pm (not only me but all of my team) and having a happy time drinking beers with my team.

Favorite Brand Experience:
Recently I found the side-kick banner. This way, the user can go deep for getting an experience without leaving the site.  These days there are many rich banners that come floating up or expand without the user’s initiation.  Personally I always think that those kind of things are just really really annoying to users. It could be giving a negative impression for your brand. But this side-kick format provides you with a rich experience with a lot of entertainment and surprise only when the user wants to see it. I like that.

�
 

When are you inspired?
Sometimes it just hits me or coming out from talented folks in my team, but it’s not always that way.After spending hours and days and nights with my team, killing small ideas, stretching, twisting, re-starting.. and then, suddenly brilliant simple idea comes out which we all say “this is it.”
 

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?
First of all, I’d say, we all should do have a clear objective, which means all the people from client, agency and productions should be trying to achieve the same goal. Online engagement with users takes place in various ways it is constantly changing. You can’t say ‘this is the only right way to go.’ Communication through digital can be anywhere and has so much potential. So we all need to be working closely together, being flexible and challenging.

Eyeblaster was just awarded a ClickZ Marketing Excellence Award for our Mobile Marketing Tool – Channel Connect for Mobile. The Awards recognize the technologies, and companies that made a positive difference in the online marketing industry in 2008, moving the industry forward by providing brilliant examples of what can be accomplished.

Here’s what the judges had to say:
“Eyeblaster offers a clearly differentiating product that ports a capability that advertisers are already familiar with to the mobile Web. This should spur further improvements in the area of mobile Web ad serving.” -Davis Brewer