Read why the director of Ogilvy's Digital Media Consulting Group thinks our dot-com heritage is a stumbling block, and why adopting R&F tools is imperative.

Jonathan Adams joined the New York advertising community in 1991. After six years of traditional media at Lowe & Partners/SMS and Ayer/The Media Edge, Jonathan shifted into interactive in 1996 and subsequently joined OgilvyOne in March of 1997. Until recently, he has led such interactive media accounts as IBM, Ameritrade, Kimberly-Clark and Sears.com, and had previously managed general media accounts such as Folgers Coffee, Mercedes Benz, Smirnoff Vodka, AT&T and Major League Baseball. Currently, as the director of Ogilvy's newest edition, the Digital Media Consulting Group, Adams oversees consulting projects for such accounts as Unilever, American Express, Eli Lilly, Motorola and Merck. We talked with Adams recently to get his views on the Interactive industry.

iMedia Connection: What’s one of the most successful campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?

Adams: Most recently, it would have to be a re-launch campaign for a financial client of ours. We were everywhere – and we leveraged RoadBlocks, PointRoll, DHTML, Flash and really dominated the space for a few weeks timed to run while the TV effort was live. It has been a big success for us because our clients were not afraid of "branding." It is not an easy thing for a DR client to allow branding into its vocabulary --- certainly not for a top DR spender online!

iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence, then, that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics?

Adams: Yes, certainly. Dynamic Logic studies we have conducted ourselves reveal a clear drive of awareness with online investment. Our clients have needed to show an increase in specific copy points and we have been able to show them many times the lifts they need through studies we have conducted in house.

iMedia Connection: In this post click-through era, what kinds of new metrics are emerging as the new measurement standards?

Adams: Even a few years ago, it was a major drive to ROI. Proving that every banner impression (whether clicked on or not) would drive to a sale was imperative to eCommerce clients as well as those with Brick & Mortar operations. For many of our clients today, the opportunity to track our target audience, who has been exposed to our advertising from impression through to sale (whether clicking or not) is where they have been headed -- and what they continue to optimize against. ROI still rules -- but now, clients with differing goals are finding their own relevant metrics rather than relying on % CTR.

This shift toward individually relevant metrics is the future. Forget what others are tracking against; focus on your own metrics for success. Whether it's reach and frequency, brand awareness, message recall, intent to purchase, advertising interaction rate, conversion to lead, shopping cart conversion rate, cost-per-lead, cost-per-sale or ROI, every client can find a metric that works for them. And most of our clients find their metrics online as a comforting reminder that their investment is well placed -- rather than a live or die reason to invest in the medium.

iMedia Connection: How does the issue of relationship marketing tie into the future of online marketing?

Adams: There are a host of clients --although not as many as you would expect -- who have discovered the value of their own data in maintaining relationships with their customers. Our clients, more often than not, are being directed on how to leverage their in-house information to extend and enrich their customer bonds. Understanding your customers, and what they expect from you, is critical to any business. In the online space, the opportunity to communicate via dynamically generated content, custom e-mail dialogues and custom offer programs designed around each customer's profile is one of the pillars of the future of our medium. Our clients who can capture this information and create individual dialogues with their customers will have a strategic advantage in the coming years.

iMedia Connection: Have you piloted any early Reach & Frequency planning on behalf of your clients? What kinds of results did these analyses reveal?

Adams: OgilvyOne's research team contributed directly to creating one of the most accepted new R&F tools available. For our ROI-obsessed clients, we leverage the tool as a means to control excessive frequency, but for our awareness-focused clients, it is a means to justify our role altogether.

We have consistently leveraged the subject of Reach & Frequency with our clients to our benefit over the past two years. One of our medium's Achilles’ heals has always been our desire to be seen as different. This, finally, brings us back to Earth. The entire discussion of R&Fs (regardless of whether you buy into the exact method one company chooses over another) is as critical to winning new business as speaking French to Parisians ... clients get Reach & Frequency. They get GRPs. They spend 95% of their budgets on these metrics -- and for us to assume we should be focusing our conversations with them on gross impressions and click-through rates is ridiculous.

iMedia Connection: Will day-parting become known as one of the Internet’s best practices, or is this perhaps more hype, than hope?

Adams: Day-parting is a commonsense method of buying, which will gain great popularity very fast. It is a sensible way to eliminate waste and increase share of voice against audiences you are trying to connect with. It's not complicated -- it will probably become a regular buying practice in six months on ALL sites.

iMedia Connection: If the industry chooses to regulate itself, who should be responsible and what sort of guidelines should be implemented?

Adams: Good question. With the IAB's shift last year toward a publisher-only base of members, the chances for an unbiased organization driving regulation are gone. The AAAAs supports our needs, the IAB that of publishers -- we can work together on developing this subject further, but it won't be easy. After all, the Ts&Cs took 2.5 years to get this far, and we can't even enforce them.

iMedia Connection: Are your clients increasing their interactive spend over time? What does 2003 look like relative to 2002?

Adams: Next year will be up, definitely. We are seeing a trend in saving this year, especially in 2nd half so that Q1 and Q2 could be stronger. We are hoping for a reasonable recovery.

iMedia Connection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?

Adams: Our dot-com heritage. Seriously. Probably less than 15% of media professionals who plan and buy Internet media have been trained in traditional media speak. Again, many in this industry speak a different language from clients with MBAs in marketing, controlling 90% of U.S. marketing budgets. As our IBM ads have joked: "Cool costs them money"... they are done with dot-com speak and the further we can get from that heritage, the faster we will recover as an industry.

iMedia Connection: What knowledge can you share to bridge the gap on how to better serve marketers’ needs in the online world?

Adams: Train your staff on the basics of media planning for TV and Print. Who cares if you'll never buy it in your life... your clients will look at you differently when you drop in a hint here and there that you can understand what life is like on their planet, because at 3% (on average) of U.S. media budgets -- we don't have a clue otherwise.