An insightful group of brand marketers, agency folks, publishers and vendors met at iMedia's Brand Summit to discuss how to create brand experiences online.

During the Monday morning session here in Lake Las Vegas for the iMedia Brand Summit, Maxim VP of Sales Steven Rosenblatt moderated a panel of brand marketers and advertisers who discussed how to create online brand experiences. The marketers represented verticals including automotive, hospitality, CPG and eyewear, while agencies and ad networks were also present.

Rosenblatt's first question to the table concerned the biggest issues and challenges for creating brand experiences through interactive media.

"Reach, gaining sufficient reach to make the investment truly worthwhile," one automotive marketer immediately replied.

"Gaining internal buy-in without being able to guarantee the reach," a CPG marketer added. "And how do you know what's good? 20,000 actively engaged consumers is good, but what is an appropriate benchmark," and how do you communicate what is a satisfactory number online to marketers accustomed to the reach of network television?

A hospitality marketer who works for a major hotel chain said that for his brand online marketing is "no longer about transactions online; upstream, it's more about the brand experience." When asked about measurement, the marketer said that while it seems very qualitative, at the end of the day online marketing is still all about measurement… although measurement can be quite subjective. This marketer's team, for example, recently created a virtual presence for one of the brand's hotel products in a social gaming environment: it was cheap to build but resulted in a huge amount of PR.

Asked what else he was measuring, the hospitality marketer described running thirty second spots on television that include search terms, and then watching search spikes when and shortly after the spots aired. They watch search queries rather than clicks, and can thereby gauge the rough impact of the TV spot.

An ad network executive asked if, at the CMO level for the brands at the table, there is an acknowledgment of the fact that online is not a broadcast medium but a highly-targeted medium, and that such targeting is by design a good thing.

The answer was an equivocal "sometimes."

For example, the CPG marketer described launching a community site that was sponsored but not explicitly branded and that included an "Ask the Expert" section for the product. In the first weeks of the site's life, 12,000 consumers signed up, but "after that initial spike, we weren't doing a lot to direct traffic there, so growth slowed." And now, the marketer and her team are "struggling to defend the weekly investment" that goes into running such a site. "It's a tough sell."

Rosenblatt then asked the table, "how many of you are reaching out to key publishing partners versus building your own" websites?

The CPG marketer replied that her brand has a deep relationship with a publisher that targets the parents of young children, sponsoring baby health and safety content with the CPG's disinfectant products. Doing so, they can "leverage traffic back to our branded site, and that takes traffic into the millions because the consumers are engaged with the context of the information."

The automotive marketer said that working with publishers can lead to "a lot of engagement," particularly when it helps consumers to "get to the configurator." For the marketer, "a publisher constructing platforms to create a more immersive experience" for in-market consumers on the sites where people already go can be positive when compared to getting people to the brand site.

The conversation turned to successful online brand experiences. The eyewear marketer described two initiatives: a form of "virtual try-on" where the consumer could upload his or her photo to a website and superimpose different sets of frames on the photo to see how they would look. Similarly, in the near future the brand will make taking a digital photo available in their retail stores, so that the consumer -- who might not have contact lenses and therefore might have difficulty seeing how a new set of frames looks -- would be able to see photos with different sets of frames at home after a store visit.

The CPG marketer gave kudos to Purina's dog chow and puppy chow sites (Purina is not one of her brands). The site asks the dog owner to share the puppy's birthday, and then communicates regularly about the puppy's life. "You end up being part of this puppy chow/dog chow family… it becomes a lifelong relationship and makes the consumers very connected with the brand."

"Like BabyCenter," another marketer added.

"Nike does a great job," the automotive marketer added. "They create experiences and very cleverly weave retail opportunities into them."

Brad Berens is executive editor for iMedia Communications. Read full bio.

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