rpinteractive was born from Rubin Postaer and Associates after the launch of a Honda campaign on the Prodigy Network in 1993. Meridee Alter has been there from the start.

Meridee Alter is Vice President, Media Director for rpinteractive, a division of Rubin Postaer and Associates. The agency's clientele include many divisions of American Honda Motor Co., Inc., bp's ARCO gasoline and am/pm businesses, and Lamaze Toys.

Alter has more than 17 years as a media professional. She is knowledgeable about traditional media principles, strategies, techniques, tactics and negotiating, but knows when to deviate from conventional wisdom to keep up with the changing demands of the Internet. iMedia Connection talked with Alter about what her agency is up to and her perspective on the interactive industry.

Meet Meridee Alter in New Mexico at the iMedia Summit, May 13 to 16. Click here for an invitation.

iMedia Connection: What's one of the most successful campaigns you've executed this year?

Alter: The launch of Honda CRV. We advertised on about 10 different automotive and lifestyle sites with a variety of units: We had an Eyeblaster ad; we used Superstitials; we did a sponsorship on TBS Sportsline's basketball fantasy league; we used e-mail; we had a tie-in with discovery.com with our offline presence. So it was multifaceted. We also did a little bit of video using some spots that were running on air.

iMedia Connection: What measurements did you use in deeming it a success?

Alter: We look at some different metrics. For the pre-launch, registration to micro-site, and post or after the launch -- which is more branding-oriented -- we did some branding studies. We're still looking over these but initially at least it looks like in almost every case there was a lift in all the qualitative information that we asked for.

iMedia Connection: What's the best integrated campaign you've seen recently?

Alter: We did something cool last year, which was a campaign for a music tour. I'm not sure it had wide awareness but it did among our target and was really successful. It was a combination effort between offline and online and promotions, targeted toward a young audience and primarily in about 20 different cities. It really performed well. In fact, the backend numbers showed that online was the most effective tool for the campaign, which was very cool to learn because we did a lot of different things and online definitely did a better job of reaching the target than anything else.

iMedia Connection: What sort of new advertising models can we expect in the future?

Alter: I haven't seen a lot of changes in the last several months since we got a slew of new rich media last year with the Shoshkeles, Eyeblasters and all those kinds of things. It seems like they're just trying to improve on those. The only new thing I've seen is these in-between pages interstitials -- we've seen one that's in-between pages as you click, we've seen one that comes up before you get to a site, we've seen another one where, if you check that you'll look at advertising you'll get to see content that normally you would have to pay for.

But I believe, having been doing this for long enough, that the future is pretty unpredictable. There might be something right around the corner we can't even imagine yet.

iMedia Connection: Why is it better for a traditional marketer to go with an interactive agency than to advertise direct with publishers OR take the entire workload in-house?

Alter: In our cases, our clients just aren't staffed to do it themselves. And they see the value of having an agency. First of all, in our case, we're an agency that's connected with a traditional agency so there's the advantage of having the people who understand your marketing full circle to be the ones to handle your advertising whether it's online or offline. That makes sense for our clients. We don't have any clients who are staffed or willing to staff up in any way to handle that. I don't think the clients realize the immense amount of workload involved if they were to do it in-house. We had one client, a dot-com, that took it in-house years ago and then called us and said, 'oh my god, we had no idea what you guys go through with the tracking and so on.'

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

Alter: When I went to the summit last year it occurred to me that we're our own stumbling block more than the clients because we still in many ways establish for the clients or recommend for the clients how they should spend their budgets. So we're the ones telling them, 'this is how much you should spend on Internet,' and I don't think we've convinced ourselves internally that we know how much should be spent on interactive vs. other media types. That's the struggle we have. The fact that it's difficult to be profitable with interactive makes it hard for agencies to want to commit more dollars or suggest to clients to spend more money in that area.

And then you get into the issue of reach/frequency and apple-to-apple ways of looking at media so you can make good decisions about how to do a media mix. And I don't know what the perfect or right mix is and I'd like the tools to help me determine that, but also so that when we bring it to our clients, it makes sense for them by being in a language that even clients who aren't real familiar with online can understand.

iMedia Connection: What can agencies do to overcome these stumbling blocks?

Alter: We need to do a better job ourselves of showing the traditional folks what we've accomplished and what we're able to do. I don't think they are as aware of it as they could be. We're working toward that. It's just about being more integrated with our marketing approaches so the Internet isn't considered just this little separate entity on its own but part of the larger picture.

iMedia Connection: Is there a same way to do CPA so everyone wins?

Alter: It's coming to an understanding when the publisher feels they're making a fair amount and we feel we're paying a fair amount. And I don't know if those two can meet or not. Probably in some cases they can when it's the right targeted media. There are probably a lot of cases when there are sites that just don't make sense for particular products, so it's never going to be effective for a publisher to agree to a CPA.

iMedia Connection: Is there enough branding research to satisfy clients? If not, what needs to be done?

Alter: It sure seems like there's a lot out there now. It's something our clients are begging for or asking for and we're bringing it to them or doing a lot of our own, which is more relevant to them. We've found that for our clients to see what some other company has done isn't that compelling to them. It's much more compelling when they see their own results, (which can be catch 22 if they're not doing anything) or results for someone in their category, maybe a competitor. This is sometimes hard to find, but in general it seems like there's a lot of studies out there now.

iMedia Connection: What are your clients' reservations about spending more money for interactive media?

Alter: Some of our clients are very convinced but they don't necessarily control the purse strings. And others believe that the mix has been working in the past with more television so they're probably a little more hesitant to take away from that. There needs to be more proof that adding X% more to Internet actually boosts your campaign, it doesn't take away from it. The OPA study with Dove about combining the media and how online contributes was a good start, and I understand they're in the process of doing a similar study with automotive, which will definitely help for us because one of our major clients is automotive.

So, it's about changing what's been done and what's been working and having good enough reason to move money from media that appears to be working to this one that's a little newer. We have to be patient. It's not going to happen overnight.

iMedia Connection: How can agencies encourage their clients to keep up with the reported increase in consumer media consumption?

Alter: Almost every time we do a plan we try to demonstrate the latest trends and what's going on with consumer consumption. We keep showing it to them - I don't know what more we can do in that respect. I actually think that the Wall Street Journal and some other publications have done a disservice in terms of talking about the collapse of the Internet when that's about a lot of dot-com companies that have collapsed but it's certainly not about people not using the Internet. That's something to get over in terms of damage that has been done in that area because if somebody not intimately involved in the medium like we are sees those headlines, he or she will probably think, 'boy this Internet thing went fast.' So all we can do is continue to educate clients, which is what we're doing.