Last year, I wrote an article titled, Show me my ads, which offered commentary on the very real challenge we’re faced with in the online space -- namely the difficulty in guaranteeing that a piece of creative will ever be seen “on demand” by the client community.
We work in a business that is dominated by two extremely important elements of consumer behavior: perception and psychology. In the vane of walking our talk, it stands to reason that the very essence of our craft should be wholly applicable not only to consumers, but also indeed to our very own clients as well.
The domino effect that is passed on from technology provider to publisher to agency to client in turn touches the monitors of our clients’ multiple constituent audiences: from their families to their colleagues, superiors, suppliers and business partners, the press and investment communities.
In order to secure widespread buy-in and support, clients need to be able to merchandise the work to their respective clients and hitting the reload button 12 times just does not qualify as a satisfactory means to achieve this end.
Every other medium has its own range of certainty in terms of visibility, for example, during the first Pod of 24. This “range” is, for the most part, patiently accepted by the marketing community as being worth the wait. In the online space, however, the unpredictability and quite frankly the lackluster nature of many executions are just not worth the effort to have to search for this needle in the haystack of clutter.
In addition, the absence of the water cooler effect online adds further complexity to this challenge. Offline delivers the same product to the various audiences at the same time. Online does not. Can you imagine the conversations around the real water cooler the next day after the launch of a hypothetical online campaign?
Client A: Well it took me 10 refreshes and five pop-unders later to find our ad.
Client B: I gave up after 15 refreshes, but I did manage to pluck a couple of chickens along the way!
There’s a certain psychological reassurance factor in being able to pick up a copy of the Journal to see your spread; there’s an element of pride in tuning in to the “West Wing” on a Wednesday night and being able to boast, “That’s my ad!” Why then is it so difficult for us to do the same online?
Options are Available
Since I wrote the original article, we’ve made some progress in this field, but for the most part, we’re still sadly lagging in terms of showcasing our work to those strategic audiences we ultimately need to win over.
One option is to mock up or construct a typical viewing environment in order to give a simulated representation of the eventual consumer experience.
There are a number of other ways to serve up this glimpse into the crystal ball. Whether agency- or publisher-initiated, unique or dummy URLS create an exclusive destination for clients to view and review at their discretion. Another option is to create tear sheets, both pre- and post-campaign. I recall CBSMarketWatch did this after the completion of a buy I ran with them.
This kind of after-the-fact merchandising creates a tangible piece of collateral that can be “remarketed” and disseminated throughout the client organization for an extended period of time.
Fixed placement or positioning is another answer. The Tiffany button on the NYTimes homepage used to be one of the best examples of assuming a degree of ownership on a prime piece of real estate. Unfortunately, you now have to refresh a few times to see this demonstration of the power of color as a branding tool.
More recently, we’ve turned to dayparting (or exclusivity in a previous life) in order to achieve our media objectives of consistent coverage and extended reach over a selected audience in a given time frame. Dayparting offers not only a more credible delivery mechanism for our campaigns, but also presents the opportunity to display our ads with a high degree of confidence that they will be seen by those who come looking for them.
These tactics empower agencies to prepare the good old campaign flighting schedule, which serves up a list of viewing possibilities to admire the work … live.
The reality is that it’s extremely difficult to guarantee your ad will appear at any given visit to a predetermined Website. And then there’s the scenario of improper loads or broken links to add insult to injury.
So the good news is that there are solutions out there. The bad news is that they generally require larger sums of money to be invested in order to guarantee being seen at a given point on a schedule.
And even when an ad is found by its intended seeker, we’re still not out of the woods. In typical client presentations, agencies tend to mock up the creative in a neatly grayed-out mock-up of the intended site. The only problem is that when viewed live, the impression – when littered with competing creatives, pop-ups and copy – may end up passing the client by, like a ship in the night.
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, you might say. Perhaps it is, or perhaps it is yet another call for larger unit sizes. All things being equal, a bigger splash is going to wet a large set of onlookers, both client and consumer alike.
So publishers and agencies take note. If you want them to show you the money, start off by showing them their ads. You might just be surprised with the results.
