This senior VP & Director of Interactive Marketing shares some insight into some user satisfaction surveys recently conducted, and explains why he thinks education is still key.

As Senior Vice President, Director of Interactive Marketing for Temerlin McClain Advertising, Hering leads a group of thirty-two staffers focused on developing interactive solutions for a variety of clients, including Adams Golf, Bell Helicopter, Nortel Networks, Subaru of America, Texas Instruments and Toshiba. He has also been involved in the development and evolution of the American Airlines Website AA.com, which has grown to over 8.3 million registered users and is considered one of the most successful airline Websites in the world. His experience includes content publishing and development, online CRM initiatives, major sponsorship/partnership development and execution and implementation of AA's innovative and award-winning interactive marketing campaigns. We talked with Hering recently to get his views on the current state of the interactive industry.

Meet James at the iMedia Summit in Keystone, Colorado, December 9th through 12th.

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

Hering: We recently implemented an online component to a fare sale campaign for American Airlines in which we dynamically built the banners off of a database that had origination, destination, and pricing information. And because we were able to adapt to the marketplace very quickly, it generated a strong ROI for our client.

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

Hering: Yes. We have done different measurement activities -- some specific brand activity, some with a syndicated research company -- that showed incremental lift in brand awareness, message awareness and purchase intent. A specific example is an ongoing measurement study we’ve conducted for over a year for Subaru. We’ve been doing some specific measurement activity with a particular group of shoppers on one particular automotive site and it has been fascinating to watch. Over a period of time, the information has been pretty consistent as far as the lift.

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

Hering: I’m absolutely fascinated with being able to actually tap the shopping cart process and delineate the value of online orders. In the past, we would take the total average of all of the transactions, figure out what an average would be and just assign that as the value to the number of successful completions to the purchase. But now we can actually peek under the hood and find out what the exact dollar value of that transaction was and then compare that vs. actions that just came in through the site vs. actions that were driven from an online ad message. We’re starting to see some interesting trends.

I am also becoming more and more interested in working with a lot of the site satisfaction tools available and tying together what the relative value of a site experience was driven off of advertising vs. people just coming to the site on their own.

I don’t think we’ve tapped into really understanding qualitative measurements on an ongoing basis, particularly when stimulated through the act of being exposed to an ad message. I think there’s some more work we can do in that area.

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

Hering: The same way it ties into all forms of marketing. Now more than ever, it’s less about a transaction and more about a relationship. And if we don’t apply the same principle to how we engage clients online, offline, any line, -- if you don’t think about what you’re asking from people when you want to create a relationship -- you can be off to a lovely start or a clash.

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

Hering: We’re actually in the process of conducting a study – we took a plan that already ran, and we’re going back and dissecting it. It was for two clients, two major advertisers. They ran campaigns that included online and offline. And we’re asking ourselves the question: Of the weight that we ran, with the addition of online in the plan, what did we gain? We’re close to results. In fact I’m trying to get the study done to discuss it at the iMedia Summit in Keystone in December.

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

Hering: Day-parting is an appropriate application of a concept long overdue for online, and it will help.

When you think about day-parting, Reach & Frequency, targeting, and clutter, all of these are marketing communications’ tactics/issues. And the more we try to be different with online, the more we find we’re really the same. Aside from this little thing called interactivity, the medium pretty much behaves the same as other media. Granted, there are unique aspects of the medium that publisher, marketer and even the consumer all end up creating defined by the type of a relationship in which we interact. We’re still trying to figure out the magical balance between that trio: publisher, marketer and user. We’re getting close, though. We all agreed that we did not like 82 banners on one page. We’re starting to get really annoyed at pop-ups. Nobody likes the idea behind Gator for the most part except for direct-response marketers. But I think what we have found is there’s incredible value in the breadth and depth of content that’s online and those marketers who find a way to appropriately engage the customer in a context-relative way add to the value. And believe it or not, customers do like good advertising. Most of the time, they don’t even consider whether the content they see is advertising or content or what. Good advertising is viewed as good content.

So we still have a ways to go, but there are some fun surprises out there.

iMedia Connection: You mentioned that nobody likes the idea behind Gator except for direct-response marketers. So are you recommending Gator and its technology to your clients, or is there a certain amount of angst?

Hering: There are so many other positive areas to focus on that we try not to get stuck in the Gator trap.

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

Hering: I do think it should be self-regulated; but I don’t know exactly what the body should be. But there are only certain specific issues that I think need to be self-regulated. Privacy is one, because of the inherent aspect of digital records that can be so easily moved, manipulated and abused. I do think there’s going to be more intense focus on standards around that.

If we only talked more about some of the abuses that catalog marketers and magazine marketers do with our names and our addresses, I think consumers would have a cardiac arrest. So I think it is all relative. There’s a point at which we might do ourselves well to be proactive about how data should be managed and secured. Take a look at some of the state-sponsored privacy efforts that the Attorney Generals are doing. For instance, in Texas, there’s a do-not-call list that you can pay to sign up on. The state is making loads of money off of this, A, and B, they sue telemarketers who violate that list. There’s a standard. What would happen if that same type of thing applied to e-mail marketing and every time a spammer sent me an e-mail I could forward it off and get them sued?

Another possible area for self-regulation is frequency of the dynamic units, pop-ups, Superstitials, things like that. I’m on the fence on that one. I think users through their communication with publishers will help create regulation for that. I think we’re starting to see that already with some publishers, like AOL, which recently announced they wouldn’t allow third-party pop-ups.

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

Hering: Yes. At a minimum 2003 budgets will be flat if not more. It’s less of an issue of should we spend online and more of an issue of what the heck is going to go on with the future of the economy.

iMedia Connection: So you’re seeing online spending on par with other spending?

Hering: Yes. If they end up cutting budgets it’s going to be across the board. I do see in some instances with technology companies in particular that they’re diverting offline money to online because they can see a much stronger correlation to activity. It’s a lot of B2B selling. Sales people as well as the marketing people are starting to believe in the value of that. They know they’ve got X number of leads in the hopper because the leads came in through requests from the site, driven off a White Paper that was dynamically delivered via a skyscraper. They’re going for that. For example, Nortel Networks used to spend a lot of money offline and a little online. We’ve done some tests in online and they’ve worked well. Now when they ramp back up, they want to leverage online. That’s a good sign.

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

Hering: Misunderstanding. When you’ve got the Wall Street Journal quoting global statistics about click-through rates online and not taking into account the bigger picture … it’s still fun to beat up on anything dot-com related. We’re all very much depressed at the state of our 401(k)s and we blame to some degree the dot-com sector. And that just oozes right over into online advertising.

iMedia Connection: So how do we get over that?

Hering: Education and success stories. There’s nothing more motivating to a client than to see the competition do well with a particular tactic. The question to a lot of marketers right now is, “Do you want to allow your competition to be actively selling in this unique channel and you not be there in a meaningful way?

It just boils down to understanding. There was a lot of puffery four or five years ago, there were a lot of promises made and broken, and those of us who are trying to be smart about online marketing have been having to figure out a way to talk about what works.

Some people just get it and some people just don’t. So we have to figure out how to talk to the people in the company who understand what we’re talking about, and they in turn have to know how to talk to other people in their companies and convince them it’s a good thing.

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

Hering: It’s going to sound fundamental, but it’s getting the objectives and strategies right from the start before you ever talk about tactics with online. That’s now more important than ever before because online marketing is being held to really tough standards in terms of performance. Just making sure we fully understand what the client really wants to try to accomplish is going to make this medium work. There are tons of fabulous solutions to problems right around the corner that online marketing can bring. But like many things in marketing, we tend to jump to tactics before we’ve figured out what we really should be saying.

So we need to make sure we take the time to articulate what it is we can do with online marketing. I can do the best, most engaging Superstitial, but if the shopping cart is dysfunctional, we won’t be able to move the needle on transactions. In fact, we might do more harm than good to the brand because we’ve set an expectation we’re not delivering on.