This Senior Vice President, Group Account Director shares his views on why he believes third-party Internet traffic measuring services are invaluable.
As Senior Vice-President, Group Account Director, Jonathan Anastas brings 13 years of experience in advertising and integrated marketing across a number of categories to Kovel/Fuller. Anastas started out at Mullen advertising on Timberland and Rolls Royce, worked on the lottery at DDB Needham in New York, and for Toyota at Saatchi & Saatchi, starting its interactive department on the west. For the past 2 1/2 years, he has been at Kovel/Fuller where he has been working on the Vivendi Universal Games offline and online account as well as Pacific Life Insurance. “There’s no separation between online and offline here at Kovel/Fuller,” Anastas says. “We look at all of our clients from an integrated marketing need.” We talked with Anastas recently to get more of his views on the interactive industry.
iMedia Connection: What’s one of the most successful “branding” campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?
Anastas: The greatest success we’ve had with branding has been Pacific Life. Our target is educated, upscale men who buy annuities and insurance. While they’re really outspent in their category, our creative campaign has managed to create double-digit increases in brand awareness, which is the pure measure they use for advertising success because, not only do they not direct sell, they don’t sell their own products.
[The success was due to] being able to create ads that break through the clutter, speak to the target audience and really try to contextually work with the media buy.
iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics?
Anastas: We have not done test sales where there have been products in which we’ve only done online and then only offline. It’s integrated. Our strategy in the video game category is to set aside 5-15% of the budget for online depending on what our target audience is and what type of game it is. We generally exceed sale goals so we have some evidence of an integrated package that certainly works.
iMedia Connection: Are third-party Internet traffic-measuring services useful beyond being something to which you have to subscribe to get R/F data?
Anastas: We find them invaluable in being the stick that insures we get the impressions we paid for because they obviously have a stricter counting metrics. Secondly, our clients are more comfortable because they get the trust of a third party to confirm the results. This is especially important because of the way online works. With magazines, clients can pick up a magazine their ads were supposed to be in and find them very quickly and it is easy for clients to pick out what they paid for. But the way the Internet works, in many of our online buys, looking at average monthly site traffic and average number of monthly impressions we bought, we could theoretically be only one of every thousand banners served so a client is going to go on the site, not see the ad and be worried. With traffic-measuring services, there’s a third party out there confirming that the ad is working. Also, they seem to streamline the trafficking process on the agency end.
iMedia Connection: Have you piloted any early Reach & Frequency planning on behalf of your clients? What did the results reveal?
Anastas: For us, the jury’s still out on the reach & frequency planning. We’re just starting to experiment with it, and I think it’s too early to say where our trust level is on it.
iMedia Connection: Are most of your clients taking advantage of day-parting or is this perhaps more hype, than hope?
Anastas: Our clients are not taking advantage of day-parting at this time, but it’s certainly an established metric in the world of broadcast, and people have believed in day-parts for a long time. The question is whether the sites are going to be able to deliver to the same degree the networks can.
iMedia Connection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?
Anastas: I think the industry’s biggest stumbling block is going back and defining the role of online. Until that role is defined, it’s hard to say if it works or doesn’t. I’ve been in the industry long enough that I’ve sort of swung from it’s a branding mechanism to it’s a direct-response mechanism to it’s a branding mechanism to it’s a direct-response mechanism to it’s a hybrid mechanism. So I think for the clients who are obviously direct selling, it either works or it doesn’t, and the cost per conversion to sale is either higher or lower than traditional, and it’s very simple. But for the great majority of clients that don’t direct sell, what’s the measure of success? Things don’t run in a vacuum. You look at your overall brand awareness going up, the medium that is driving that, and at click-throughs. Do click-throughs matter if you’re not direct selling? I still think it’s a little bit like Madison and Vine. It’s important, it’s necessary, but I don’t think there’s going to be a single metric.
iMedia Connection: What knowledge can you share to bridge the gap on how to better serve marketers’ needs in the online world?
Anastas: Over 13 years, I’ve worked in a large number of categories with a large number of needs, I’ve been in the Internet space since the very beginning but have made a specific choice not to chase the pure play and to always look at Internet marketing from the holistic viewpoint where it is in with all of the other marketing possibilities and tools. At the end of the day, advertisers don’t choose whether or not to advertise online. They choose what percentage is going to television, print, the Internet. This medium has to live within those media choices.
iMedia Connection: Have any of your clients successful utilized any emerging technologies, such as IM, wireless, iTV, etc.?
Anastas: We’ve been involved with some instant messaging tests, broadband tests and TiVo tests. A lot of it depends on your needs and your target audience. Initial learning believes that IM may be an effective way to reach teens. I think wireless is a whole bunch of hype. For some reason, we haven’t jumped over to the degree that Japan has in this sort of usage.