This IP Director decides the types of campaigns to pursue and works on developing the direction and strategy of Starcom IP.

Starcom IP, a segment of Starcom MediaVest Group, was formed when online started to become a viable media vehicle and a group of people specialized in online was needed. Shelby Saville reports that the company has grown significantly within the last three to four years. There are currently 65 people within the organization who focus not only on online media but also on how online media fits within an advertising campaign. Starcom IP’s larger clients include: Kellogg’s, Miller, U.S. Army, Network Solutions and Polaroid. We talked with Saville recently regarding the industry.

Meet Shelby at the iMedia Summit, May 4-7 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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

Saville: What they do at Kellogg’s is great. It’s not just about getting the Kellogg’s brand out there, it’s about getting kids to interact with Kellogg’s whether it’s interacting with the characters or playing a game using the product – anything that creates a fun atmosphere and a fun place for them to be that has to do with Kellogg’s. The company uses partner sites to provide a branded experience to kids versus advertising to them, and I think that’s probably one of the most successful branding campaigns we’ve done recently.

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

Saville: Some of the best stuff we do in Direct Response is with Network Solutions. With Network Solutions, we’ve done as much research we can do to really understand the buying behavior of our target as well as the way they are consuming the media we are targeting to them. And then we really optimize our campaigns with all of that information along with response information and then dive down and find what we like to call the “proven winners”-- the sites that can consistently deliver against our goals -- and then continue to have that pool so we can turn on or off or have a sense of how they respond in order to reach the goal at the end of the day. Again, it’s just doing any research we can to not just say, “This did well, but why did it do well?”

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

Saville: Yes. Mostly with every campaign we do we have some sort of success measurement. If it’s direct response it’s easy because it’s direct response. When it’s branding, it’s obviously a little harder. We have never done a brand campaign in which we have not done some sort of brand study whether it’s through a third-party like a Dynamic Logic or a proprietary study. With most of those, we’ve seen a positive impact on the brand: brand perception, brand awareness, purchase intent of brand association, messaging association and recall. Consistently we see positive results. Now that doesn’t mean everything is positive. It always depends on the campaign and where the brand started in awareness but we do have many cases in which we can show positive lifts in brand awareness and other brand metrics.

iMedia Connection: Are third-party Internet traffic-measuring services useful beyond being something you have to subscribe to to get R/F data?

Saville: Because I work with direct-response clients, we use the third-party tracking for a lot of our optimization. For example, we look at how an individual placement actually is working. So we need to do that beyond the overall reach/frequency. We do drill down pretty hard. Plus, we’ve been having a lot of discussions about such concepts as day-parting. You can get that through the third-party tracking services sometimes so we do use it to just kind of mind the data in any way we may need to for a client versus just doing it for seeing what’s our reach or at the end of the day what was our frequency.

iMedia Connection: In regards to Reach & Frequency, is one source better than another in achieving predictability in planning tools vs. post?

Saville: I have not seen one that I have felt extremely comfortable with. I’ve seen some of them that are starting to come out that I say, “O.K. This is potentially going to do well,” but to be honest there isn’t one that I use at this time that I would use for anything more than just taking a look at it. I wouldn’t yet plan off of it. I have concerns about the data and whether or not the data is going to be as helpful as it needs to be at this point in time. But I think a lot of people are starting to go in that direction.

iMedia Connection: You mentioned looking into day-parting. Are most of your clients taking advantage of day-parting today or is this perhaps more hype, than hope?

Saville: Some are, but what we’re seeing is there might be a few clients for which it makes sense. We’re starting to actually run reports to look at day-parting and whether or not we see a difference during time of day and we’re not seeing that -- we’re often times seeing that people are responding the same way in response rate at 2 a.m. versus 2 p.m. Now, I would say that there are probably products out there for which you could make the case that day-parting would make a lot of sense, but for a lot of the ones we look at, at least the ones that I oversee, we haven’t seen that.

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

Saville: It’s still that there are a lot of people out there that say they understand online makes sense and they want to do it, but they don’t completely understand their consumers and how they use online. They’re still [wondering]: Do people really use it or do they just use it for e-mail? I think also a lot of clients say, “It’s really hard to execute an online campaign because there are so many more things involved.” You’re looking at response or you’re looking at brand metrics so you have research in there and you have optimization and replanning. They say, “I’d like to spend the money, but it seems always like I pay more attention to trying to get the online campaign up and running than I do TV, print and radio.” It’s just easier to do those, and so I think that can be a stumbling block.

And I think we’re still kind of that second medium so it’s easy to be cut when the budget is cut because we’re that extra thing. We’re still kind of finding that if there is a budget cut, people kind of go to online first.

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

Saville: It just goes to continuing to try to figure out consumer understanding. We get so excited on the technologies that we could have, that you can get this piece of data or you can serve this type of ad, but you have to pay attention to what the consumer cares about and what they need from online and how you can build that need through your product or your advertiser or through what you’re giving them. Oftentimes, the consumer gets lost when we talk about online because it becomes about the medium and not about the consumer.

iMedia Connection: Have any of your clients successfully utilized any emerging technologies, such as IM, wireless, iTV, etc.?

Saville: Our Miller client does a lot of innovative things. They’ve done a lot with instant messaging, which has been very successful for them. And then we actually have a person in our department who heads up all of our TV 2.0, which is all of our iTV and that kind of thing. I can’t list the clients because a lot of them are just starting, but he is working with a lot of our traditional clients who are our traditional TV clients and showing them the need to pay attention to the emerging contacts in the TV realm. He has been getting a lot of tests up and running to see how that can impact your campaign.