The East Cost Media Director explains why the ability to extend an exposure past 30 seconds and “convince” your prospects to purchase your product is where we have to be.

As East Coast Media Director of OMD Digital, Jeff Minsky runs a consolidated group of Tribal DDB, Atmosphere BBDO, TBWA Chiat, and RappDigital Media. Minsky has more than a decade of media planning experience in print, television, radio, newspapers, and out-of-home media. Some of his interactive experience includes work for IBM, Kodak, Hyatt Hotels, Philips, Norelco, Sonicare, Direct TV, and Southwestern Bell Communications. Minsky talked to iMedia Connection recently to give his views on the direction of the interactive marketing industry and suggestions for its improvement.

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

Minsky: Via our partners in Rapp we have something current with Norelco and the next James Bond movie. We’re leveraging the high-profile movie to benefit the shaver. We’re focusing on areas of entertainment and coverage of the movie to reach the appropriate demographics. We’re talking about a fairly high-end product, so we looked for other areas within the AOL-Time Warner properties to reach the affluent male as well as the affluent female gift giver. In addition, we strived to really limit the amount of small ad units and optimize to larger more impactive ad opportunities. Although early in the campaign, the initial results have been positive with the key driver being editorial relevance and ad unit size.

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

Minsky: Yes and No. What I mean by that is that we have executed Pre/Post Awareness studies, as have many in our industry, to track Brand Impact of online campaigns. Our mantra is to make media accountable from a brand perspective and ROI perspective. However, the medium itself will not drive Brand. The same elements of creative that drive Brand Awareness, Attribution, and Preference in the offline world will drive it in the online world. For our clients that have followed Best Practices with good creative ad units and relevant targeting, we have seen phenomenal Brand improvements; where the creative was average or below, the needle has not moved to the same degree.

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

Minsky: Without question, depth and time of visit. How long does someone stay on the Website? How many pages deep do they go into that site? And, of course, the golden egg of who can quantify offline sales from online visits. We have a couple of clients who are running studies to correlate online advertising with offline sales.

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

Minsky: It is the single largest differentiator between on and offline media. The ability to extend an exposure past 30 seconds and actually communicate and “convince” your prospects to purchase your product is where we have to be. However, that does present a challenge in defining what Advertising does. We have clients who are starting to view advertising less as a marketing communications vehicle and more as a sales channel. If that’s how agencies are to be judged and graded, we certainly have to have more of an ability to sell. Few people buy $1,000 products on an impulsive buy. Relationship marketing is a key integration into the sales process, but that takes time and effort to complete the sale. This is a very different mentality for Advertising Agencies who are used to the role of getting the prospect to the front door, but we are not accountable for everything afterwards. The client must be willing to change their perception and compensation of what an Ad Agency is if, in fact, success is to be judged on sales, whether immediate or latent.

iMedia Connection: Have you piloted any early Reach & Frequency planning on behalf of your clients?

Minsky: No. We want the best possible system, but we don’t feel we need to create it ourselves. There are people in the field more knowledgeable than we are. At the same time, I haven’t seen the perfect system yet, and I am uncomfortable providing R/Fs if they are not at least somewhat close to reality. We are working with all the parties involved in order to make the systems more accurate, and I am confident that by the early part of 2003, we will be actively engaging at least one of the products. I still have a concern that given the Direct Response elements of Interactive Media, we have to be extremely vigilant that R/Fs do not become the main focus or a “success metric”.

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

Minsky: For some clients that have products delivered on a time-basis, such as Starbucks in the morning or McDonald’s for lunch-time traffic, there can be interesting usages of day-parting. At the same time, there are plenty of clients that have absolutely no need for day-parting.

iMedia Connection: Are you recommending Gator and its technology to your clients, or is there a certain amount of angst?

Minsky: There’s a great amount of angst. Regardless of who’s right or wrong, I don’t like putting my clients in the line of fire, especially on a topic that is generating a tremendous amount of PR. We’ve stayed away from recommending any of the URL Targeting programs for now. It’s such a heated topic. Even our clients are saying ‘don’t recommend Gator to us.’ However, I can see where URL targeting could be used without some of the issues that have arisen if it is used to target users on sites that do not accept advertising.

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

Minsky: Barring any major catastrophe or extended military action in Iraq—absolutely. Market prices have come down to efficient levels. The ad units that are available are more pleasing to the client, and the reporting from the backend has started to deliver on some of their promises.

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

Minsky: There is still the basic issue of understanding and clearing the confusion of “is it a Branding vehicle or Direct Marketing vehicle?” As clients are still breaking the process into two, it creates a great deal of confusion on how to judge success of the campaign. We need to get clients (and our internal factions) to realize that the days of separate entities and process for Branding and Direct Response are over. We live in a new world where you must take Best Practices from both and create something that is very different. In our world there will always be an opportunity to generate a response. If you are not doing something to facilitate that and carry through once you have the response, then you have not done everything you can do to extend your clients’ investments.

Another obstacle, more tactically, is ad serving costs. Because the price of the medium has gone down, the relative ad serving costs have skyrocketed, especially rich media. We know the technologies that are effective and clients like, but at the same time the ad serving costs are pricing companies out of the market. Someone’s got to figure out how to serve this stuff at a much lower cost than it’s being served now.

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

Minsky: Be smart, be educated. Unfortunately, our good friends the portals burned the clients big time. Hopefully, these clients still recognize that’s the old marketplace and the new marketplace is based on strong fundamentals and doesn’t over-promise and under-deliver. Nevertheless, we’re in a pretty good place right now.