This Senior VP reveals how the agency got involved with the NYT’s Site Sessions and why they like the concept, and gives his views on day-part buying.
Last week, New York Times Digital rolled out Site Sessions, a new ad-buying model similar to the day-part model used in broadcast. American Airlines was the first advertiser to test the concept, running an ad from 9 to 10 am each day Monday June 3rd through Wednesday, June 5th. iMedia Connection talked with James A. Hering (Bio), Senior Vice President, Director – Interactive Marketing Resource Group for Temerlin McClain, the agency that made the deal. Hering reveals how the agency/client got involved and why they like the concept, and gives his views on how interactive media will be purchased in the future.
iMedia Connection: Why did you choose the Site Sessions for American Airlines?
Hering: The reason why we like this as an emerging model for online marketing is that when you look at a lot of the current fundamentals -- intense clutter, being one ad in rotation with 38 others in one spot, the fact that people’s attention spans when it comes to looking at a Web page or a site can be pretty short (they’re on a mission to do something, to find something, to buy something and they’re not always prone to being receptive to a message) -- the concept of site sessions, hopefully, will let us wrap our arms around the customer as they utilize a particular site. And the strategy works for specific types of sites like a New York Times. It’s a subscription base, and people come there and spend some time with that publication to look at the content. We feel we have an opportunity to not just communicate with the right audience but also hopefully get the message across.
iMedia Connection: Do you have results of the campaign yet?
Hering: We have very preliminary results. They’re very favorable. We tend to not look at data on a very short window because we know from a brand perspective we’re looking at something that’s going to be effective a little bit longer term. Our initial numbers are very favorable, though.
And we’ve looked at performance of these types of programs before at two levels. One is the very direct-response level: how many eyeballs did we get? How many people did we drive to the site? And how many people did we get to take the intended action? What we have found is this type of approach builds frequency, builds reach against the audience and tends to drive better transactional activity.
On the other level, the message awareness level, we see nice bumps in terms of message awareness. With a brand like American, we’re not going to look so much at brand awareness because most people know who we are and what we do. Instead we communicate a specific message, like in this case we’re promoting the site and the new features.
A campaign like this is not so much focused on the click through, although we’re very pleased to see that we do get great results and we get good post-click and post-view activities for the advertiser. But we’re more pleased with the fact that we see people come away with some of the message.
iMedia Connection: How did you come to be the first advertiser using the Site Sessions?
Hering: As a strategic goal, we readily network with the sites of the leading publishers and say, ‘Hey, we are very much interested in new and innovative opportunities -- rich media and different ways to approach online marketing -- and so they know that when we’re in the marketplace to buy for our clients that that’s one of our primary objectives.
iMedia Connection: Why is being innovative so important to your agency and its clients?
Hering: This medium has such a “long and storied history” of five years, nobody knows the magic formulas yet. Nobody knows exactly what works well. So we’re in a persistent test mode -- evaluate and apply the learning type of cycle until we really find the approach that’s going to be meaningful for the marketer, meaningful for the publisher and meaningful for the consumer. Right now, online marketing does not hang across all three areas. If you look at it from the user perspective, they see way too many ads and it’s too cluttered, so ads don’t have a lot of impact. You look at it from a publisher’s perspective, and 70% of their ad inventory goes unsold. You look at it from a marketer’s perspective and they’re not really sure yet what this medium is and what it’s really going to bring to them. We still have to work on all three levels to ensure what’s best. We can do a killer program for the marketer, for example, but if it’s going to jeopardize the publisher’s ability to communicate with its audience, they’re not going to keep that audience and therefore that publication will no longer be great for our marketers. So we’re all in this together.
There have been attempts to get to this level; you know the whole cost-per-click model for example, which has been disastrous for publishers, and hasn’t really been good for users either. Who wants to see their 10,000th x10 camera pop up? But that seemed to be an interesting model when it first came out.
iMedia Connection: How much was reaching the daytime audience a factor in deciding to try the Site Sessions?
Hering: A lot. The number one medium between 9 and 5 PM is the Internet, especially when you start to think about people who are key influencers and decision makers for B2B purchases. Also just influencing people who have input on decision processes for what direction the company goes in. A lot of the research and studies we see indicate that people are not utilizing trade publications as much, they are going online to get instant access information in order to make decisions. IT decision makers, for example, are using online vs. reading trade books to do product evaluations, to learn about companies and suppliers, to really understand what is the smart solution to recommend to their CIOs. So we think it’s very key to be there during the day.
The other thing is, we’re very cognizant of the fact that May was the first month in the history of the Internet that there were more broadband minutes accessed on the Web than narrowband. And this is driven not so much from the growth of DSL and cable, but from the fact that people readily understand the difference between their experiences at work and at home online and we see pockets of people tucking their lives into their at-work Internet minutes. You see it the first hour of the workday and you see it at lunch. People are utilizing that broadband connection because they know it’s just going to be that much more productive for them. We really see a proliferation of that.
In fact, it’s amazing to see someone who has gone to somebody else’s house and seen their cable connection and what their friend experiences and then they go back home to their dial-up connection. These people are more likely to shift important online activities, decision-making processes or shopping to their at-work access before work or that first hour at work. They’re also managing their financial lives, because they can quickly access stock quotes and make a trade or two before their boss comes around the corner. We’re seeing a lot of that. So this whole notion of the at-work audience is fantastic.
iMedia Connection: Do you think day-part pricing is going to catch on?
Hering: Yes. One of the big trends we’re going to see is people getting much more focused on day-part buying. I think that will have a pretty big impact.
In fact, I will go out on a limb here: In working with some of the major publishers, we see some particular pieces of real estate for which there’s actually going to be an upfront market, like in broadcast. I’ll give you a quick example: Yahoo! Auto has a very successful program called the Model Showcase in which you occupy a prominent space in Yahoo! Auto’s main page for a month that links to essentially a full-page ad. We did this for Subaru back in January. In January of this year, that real estate was very reasonably priced. And then a few marketers started to test with it in January, February and March, and then by April the entire year was completely bought up and we could not buy it again even though our client was interested in it. Now, because the site has so much demand for that particular real estate, the site is actually talking about having an upfront market for it in September/October and let the highest bidders take the space.
That is where I think publishers are starting to get smart and creating an audience that is willing to interact with brands in a particular place online. And then marketers are going to be willing to put money into it because they know it works. I can see this happening more and more.
iMedia Connection: What’s another example, then?
Hering: CBS MarketWatch is another smart site that is creating demand for its audience by limiting the number of advertisers that can have their exclusive home page. That drives prices up, it creates demand, and I think audiences appreciate it because, ‘This day brought to you by CBS MarketWatch by this particular marketer’ is probably more appealing than having six or seven ad spots all on one page trying to draw your attention when all you’re trying to do is look for a stock price.
iMedia Connection: How can other publishers follow suit?
Hering: Publishers have to exercise self-control and create some exclusivity with the real estate and inventory. There’s nothing more frustrating then telling your client, ‘Hey, we’ve got a banner on abcnews.com.’ And the client goes there and he clicks and can’t find it. We tell him to hit the reload button because the ad is in rotation and he calls back and says it took 38 times to get the ad. Publishers need to become a little smarter and not try to sell everything to everyone all the time, even though they can do that with the Internet because the ad inventory is virtually limitless. I think you hurt yourself by approaching it from that same model.
iMedia Connection: Isn’t there some disadvantage of having exclusivity on some of these sites?
Hering: There’s potential for overuse and abuse of it. As Grandma always says, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I think from a marketing perspective and from a publisher’s perspective, you don’t want to totally dominate a site or a page because then it looks like complete sponsorship or ownership of that content, and I don’t think users would necessarily want to have that. Nor would publishers, especially sites like New York Times Digital; it wants to maintain its editorial separation; it doesn’t want to feel like American Airlines owns a particular section of its site. I think that’s where a lot of marketers really got in trouble three years ago when they were buying up these major sponsorships. And at the same time, you want to be careful that you’re not just saturating one particular audience because the Web in its very nature is very vertical and sites have a very vertical audience. So there is an opportunity to over saturate one particular group of customers who are regular visitors of a particular site.