ValueClick's EVP of sales and marketing shares his thoughts on what makes a successful campaign and on what still needs to be done to bring more brands online.

ValueClick, Inc. is a leading global provider of digital marketing solutions for advertisers and Web publishers, offering marketers and advertisers a wide spectrum of custom media and technology solutions such as publisher and real-time third party ad serving; CPM, CPC, and CPA models; agency management software; and both customer acquisition and customer retention e-mail technology to further their brand and attract targeted, high-quality customers.

With more than 10,000 sites in its network, and between 100 and 200 clients such as Coca-Cola Company, Heineken N.V., Sara Lee Corporation, British Airways and Verizon advertising with the company each month, ValueClick has its finger on the pulse of the interactive marketing industry. iMedia Connection talked with Dave Yovanno, executive vice president of sales and marketing, for his perspective on what's happening and what still needs to be done.

iMedia Connection: Tell me about an interactive campaign that you believe was successful. What did it entail? What measurements did you use in deeming it a success?

Yovanno: In terms of our media business, we service two primary online objectives, one being the more brand or awareness objective and the other being more of a direct marketing/acquisition-based objective. Our roots are in the latter. A good most recent example of a direct marketing objective was Chevron, who was trying to get signups for its gas card. So when we went to meet with them they had just started running with Yahoo!. We had explained to them that basically there is AOL, Yahoo!, MSN and everything else, and we consider ourselves everything else. We try and aggregate the more niche destinations, specific-interest sites across the Internet -- which is really more of what the Internet is all about -- and aggregate them within certain channels, etc. And in terms of direct marketing goals, our expertise is then in doing some tracking so we can tie it to action on the advertiser's site and get better at placement across our network of sites: Domestically we have about 10,000 sites in our network and those are segmented into channels.

For Chevron, they were also concerned about their brand, they didn't want to be on environmental related sites or things like that. So rather than expose them to an entire network, we carved out about 20 sites. What we find with some of our more niche interest sites is that a lot of time they get better results than your Yahoo!'s etc. when it comes to performance. So for Chevron, we set up unique tracking - relaying information back to Chevron for each conversion so we could optimize or take sites out. They were after a $30/cost per approved application. That's one style of campaign that we do.

iMedia Connection: What about a branding or awareness campaign?

Yovanno: A most recent example that I actually just presented at the Online Advertising Summit two weeks ago in New York is Universal for the Spy Game movie. Universal was working with DBB here in LA. We took more of an agency approach with DBB. We met with them, tried to understand what their objectives were for the campaign. They're still after people ultimately showing up at the box office, but Universal Studios is one of the real believers in online marketing in terms of making people aware. With the movie theaters, we've done a lot of business with them lately, they're still after getting people to the box office but they look less at how many people showed up; they're more after an awareness goal. So for them, we played a big role in putting together the overall package, which included a turnkey sweepstakes promotion. We did all the creative for them, we designed a microsite, we came up with a scavenger hunt strategy so when people came to their microsite it was a series of questions, and then they registered. We did Eyeblaster placement on sites like Hollywood.com, Washington Post and some others. We also gave them additional reach through our entertainment channel in our network. All in all we collected about 30,000 names. The campaign ran for about 20 days. On opening weekend we used our MOJO mail platform to send out a reminder e-mail to those people who registered. The client was thrilled, even though we didn't have any hard-core metrics about how many people showed up at the box office.

iMedia Connection: What's needed to provide those hard-core metrics?

Yovanno: We still need to be at a higher level. When you look at the level of budget commitment that Spy Game had to offline compared to our online campaign, when we did an exit poll survey, just looking at our budget imbalance, of course more people are going to say that they heard of it from TV rather than online. What we're still waiting for is what I call the critical mass to happen. We're starting to see it with the U.S. online audience now being over 54%. That's still not good enough. We still need more critical mass in some of our larger markets. We need to be able to do local market testing to show a lift in sales or a lift in people showing up at the box office to really continue to win confidence over with these folks that online marketing really works. For example, we're talking to Papa Johns right now, which is pretty large in the Texas area. We're targeting Houston as a local market test for an online strategy that will employ a new coupon technology. We're going to try to tie that back to purchase.

iMedia Connection: What are your thoughts on interactive as a branding medium?

Yovanno: Internally we draw a difference between branding and awareness. I would equate the two: With branding, you're more concerned about the content that your brand is associated with. With awareness, you're after reach. On TV, the similarity would be Lincoln wants full coverage of the U.S. Open, it's concerned about its brand being associated with a premiere golf tournament as opposed to any of the Hollywood studios, which just have their movies out on every single channel. They don't necessarily want to be associated with a golf tournament, they just want to be everywhere and make everyone aware of their movies. So for us, there really is a difference between the two. For your more brand-sensitive clients, like out of Ogilvy we're planning for P&G, which is a very brand-sensitive client, we have to be very careful about the sites that we choose. It's less of a network strategy and more of a site-specific strategy, which usually includes content integration. You are trying to collect some lead information to try and develop a relationship with that individual and it's much more targeted.

iMedia Connection: What's the biggest misunderstanding agencies and/or marketers have about interactive marketing?

Yovanno: I don't think that for the most part people really are planning. I think the tide is coming over a little bit where I'm starting to see a little more activity on the planning side, but in the past, I think they've just been buying impressions and haven't put a whole lot of effort into the overall strategy. The reason why I say that is that we see it everyday -- part of the position that we're in is that we touch between 100 and 200 advertisers every month and we see all different types of strategies. We see how different campaigns are set up. And I think up until now, people haven't been paying attention to the creative, making sure that it really relates to the landing page. I can't tell you how many campaigns came to us even from agencies that would send clickers right to the home page. And the Web is such a unique medium that you have the ability to really tailor messages, not just on a personal level, but specific to promotions. So if you're running a banner ad or whatever that promotes a specific offer you shouldn't take respondents to a home page, you should take them to a page that's specific to that offer and guide them through the Web. The Web is a very deep environment. Users need some guidance. You need to make it simple for them. If you take them right to the home page, chances are you didn't accomplish your goal. So, the misunderstanding is how to make it work, how to plan it and put together campaigns that make sense. If marketers and agency folks just apply the same planning that they did offline, I think they'd be much further ahead.

iMedia Connection: What do you see as marketers' reservations about advertising online?

Yovanno: There was a report that came out by IPRO that talked about why people aren't spending more money online. I agreed with a lot of the reasons given. I think the major reason, and this is just my personal opinion, is that they don't trust the Web. It's not tangible for them. When they book a campaign with us, they're booking X number of impressions. They have no idea if they're served. They don't care what the third-party ad server said, or what our numbers say, they still don't trust it. It's not like viewing a commercial or opening the Wall Street Journal and seeing your ad.

We did our research, in December, with 30 brand-type of clients or traditional advertisers, and we found that a lot of these people were just having to go through a re-education process regarding the Internet and why to invest in the Internet from a marketing perspective. There really has been a bit of a backlash because the last couple of years were such a heyday without a lot of good, solid metrics tying into or comparing to offline activity. So I know that in talking to some of the people whom I talk to who are specifically dedicated to online or interactive, they felt that they had a big job in front of them in order to get their organization believing in it again. It's like they're gun shy. And in the same vein, there's still the challenge of comparing apples to apples; comparing your TV buy, your print buy to your online buy, which I think the industry is forging ahead on … we've got Dynamic Logic out there doing things, you've got Avenue A trying to establish some different metrics. I think the industry is definitely behind trying to create a standard comparison. That's the only way to overcome this -- to work on the metrics. Let's agree on what makes sense. But we're still experimenting, unfortunately.

iMedia Connection: As an industry, what do we need to be doing to get rid of these reservations and move the industry forward?

Yovanno: Metrics are pretty much the key. We need to feel comfortable with the results of the campaign, we can't just report impressions and clickthroughs anymore. Those are important, as well as the actions that happen on the site, but you have so many different Websites out there, you have so many different ad-serving reports, there's really no standards. Media planners even are confused about what's what: "Is the buy that I made from ValueClick the same that I made from Yahoo! in terms of impressions, etc?" We really do need some kind of Neilsen standards in terms of quantifying the results of any campaign -- be it a brand, awareness or direct-marketing campaign -- because we know that we're not getting credit for a lot of our direct marketing campaigns. We're not getting credit for the life-time value, we're not getting credit for all the impressions we've delivered that generated actions not on the clickthroughs but had an impact on communicating that brand to an individual who later went and took a desired action on that advertiser's site.

iMedia Connection: What role do you think service providers such as Valueclick need to play in helping to further the industry?

Yovanno: Valueclick hasn't been in a position to invest in R&D. We've kind of been waiting for some of the fall out to continue to happen before we made a significant investment in moving that forward but we absolutely plan to and we have been doing some local events to try and get the different media planners and agencies together to talk about the things that we need to be doing to help them continue to win confidence over from their clients. The value that we bring is our reach across the Internet in terms of aggregating publisher inventory. We're also able to get it on aggressive pricing schedules. Agencies typically aren't set up to go direct to a publisher consistently. The value that we bring to a publisher is 200 advertisers. Typically a media planner is only taking one advertiser to an individual publisher. So that's the value that we bring, but it's our fiduciary responsibility to do two things. The first is to manage the inventory so that the publisher continues to pay their bills and make money in terms of applying our technology to get them better clickthrough rates, etc. if they're being paid on a clickthrough or just better advertisers if they're being paid on a CPM basis. From an advertiser standpoint, it's the same in terms of just applying our technology to get them better clickthrough rates if that's their objectives or better conversion rates if that's their objective. So, we make their life simple in terms of reaching more of what the Internet is all about, which is specific interests. When certain inventory isn't performing, let's say in a month campaign, we have the ability to maneuver that inventory, to get it on better performing inventory, whereas that's a lot to manage for an individual agency or client themselves. And we continue to work with vendors such as Dynamic Logic and others in different ad formats and trying to apply them throughout our network. Our position is not to be on an exclusive contract with someone like Eyeblaster. Our position is we need to be able to accept anything and everything. Our job is to make sure our technology code is enabled to execute that across 40% of the Internet audience.

iMedia Connection: That's a good position to take. Do you sell this to your clients?

Yovanno: Our company's position is that you can't be successful in selling technology unless you're successful in selling media, otherwise, who are you selling your technology to? With the MediaPlex acquisition, it became a strategic accomplishment for us as a company, it really put us smack in front of DoubleClick as a competitor especially considering our cash reserves now and our possibilities for break-even levels cash-flow wise.

iMedia Connection: What else does the industry need to be doing?

Yovanno: We don't claim to have it all figured out but we continue to work with people at more of a local level to understand their objectives and try to document it as much as we can. That's the other thing the industry needs to be doing a better job at. I think the IAB just recently has been more active to that end which is documenting more concrete examples of what's working and what's not. It's almost bad in the sense that there has been so much fall out in the industry when you consider that there are lots of people out there now kind of preaching the benefits of online marketing. We need more people out there trying to win the confidence over and putting together a successful campaign. At the Online Advertising Summit a couple of weeks ago they were requesting submissions for the top online campaign for 2001. There were 154 submissions. They did like a mini case study write up for each one of those submissions and I was blown away at the level of effort that had gone into creative campaigns online. And I think that most people aren't even aware of all the cool things that are happening. We need some sort of documentation and publishing of all this great stuff so we can continue to work with people and finally get to a level at which they're actually booking their online campaigns a year in advance, you know, for a new movie coming out. I would love for us to get to that level because they know it and they trust it.

iMedia Connection: Are we moving forward?

Yovanno: I think we're moving forward. We're still moving forward slowly, though. The lion share of the money that is spent online is still action-based money; it's direct-marketing money, it's money that's spent online because the online business model is a perfect match with their business model and they've been able to drive prices low enough in our market to really accomplish their business objectives. Slowly but surely we're seeing more and more brand consumer packaged goods companies etc. spend a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more; agencies are getting better at cultivating those relationships and making them feel comfortable with spending the money online. So our focus right now is to continue to ensure that we have fostered and are continuing to foster relationships with agencies. We're best at executing, we're not best at planning although we do a good deal of planning even with agencies and executing a campaign online. We're really reliant on the agencies that have the better relationships with clients and mostly from the traditional planning to win their confidence.