The Senior Vice President of Marketing & Sales for this leading health-related site explains how a lack of confidence in publishers is holding back the industry.

WeightWatchers.com currently generates over two (2) million unique users per month and is the leading health-related site based on page views and stickiness. The primary objectives of WeightWatchers.com are to support the overall Weight Watchers brand by being the gateway to "all things Weight Watchers"; to drive consumer acquisition for meetings and, importantly, for Internet subscription products; and to retain consumers within the Weight Watchers franchise.

Kevin Eberly is senior vice president of marketing and sales for WeightWatchers.com and is responsible for developing and overseeing all aspects of WeightWatchers.com's global marketing strategy and integrating it into Weight Watcher International's global marketing efforts. "We're effectively delivering the global weight-loss brand's message, information, and tools to meeting members and self-help dieters alike through the Internet," Eberly says. "We also offer Weight Watchers Online, a online subscription product, for self-help dieters who cannot join meetings."

Eberly spoke recently to iMedia Connection to give his views on the direction of his company's involvement in online advertising and marketing.

iMedia Connection: What has your company done recently that's different and unique in the interactive space? And can the data be tracked and supported with credible research?

Eberly: First of all, as the exclusive online licensee of Weight Watchers International (WWI), we focus our current advertising efforts entirely in the Internet space. From a traffic-driving standpoint, we benefit tremendously from the nearly $70 million WWI spends globally on more traditional offline media, much of which prominently displays our URL. With respect to different and unique activity, we focus on building integrated partnerships where we can leverage our industry-leading content to create mutually beneficial arrangements with high affinity publishers (from a consumer-profile perspective) to enhance their sites while driving direct-response results for us. In fact, while many advertisers are "bottom feeding" to save money and increase impressions, we have found that taking the high road has proven to be both effective and cost efficient. We track everything we do to business building actions via third-party adserving and tracking technology.

iMedia Connection: What sort of Internet-related marketing/advertising do you do?

Eberly: Wherever possible and sensible we want to pursue content integration types of deals with key publishers, both portals and high affinity verticals, to become more relevant to the online consumers' experiences. Other than that, since we're still relatively new, we test heavily to determine where we should be, what we should be doing and how we should be doing it for future efforts. We track performance via a series of metrics on a constant basis so we know what's working and what isn't and we try to scale up our investments in the places that work.

iMedia Connection: What sort of cross-media campaigns have your run?

Eberly: We're definitely looking for ways to coordinate our online activities with WWI's offline activities, but we haven't done a lot yet. We're still a fairly new company on the Internet side so we're learning our way through this thing, and in the future you'll be seeing more cross-media activity from us.

iMedia Connection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics (purchase intent, brand awareness, etc.)?

Eberly: To date, we can safely draw the conclusion that online advertising works for our business on several dimensions. However, there are huge opportunities on the part of publishers to capitalize on the great promise of the Internet as a direct-response medium. While there may have been some over-promises and under-deliveries early on, direct response remains the key point-of-difference for the Internet versus many offline vehicles, and its benefits are not being positioned or sold by publishers to advertisers.

My background prior to this job was with consumer-products companies and with traditional offline media and my experience over the past year would suggest a serious lack of accountability on the part on online publishers. Many simply don't deliver on their commitments making the space very unpredictable from a revenue planning perspective. If you've done a good job understanding your product and your consumer and you have a predictable sales cycle, you want to develop a media plan that supports that behavior, and you need to trust your partners to deliver on that plan. Currently that level of confidence, at least for us, doesn't exist.

iMedia Connection: Since interactive is the most accountable advertising and marketing medium, what are you doing to effectively measure the overall effects of various initiatives online, such as advertising, promotions, CRM, etc.?

Eberly: We utilize third-party adserving and tracking technology to measure the impact of all our spending to specific actions that, we believe, build our overall brand and drive revenue-generating consumer actions.

iMedia Connection: How essential is it for the industry to measure apples-to-apples by using comprehensive online reach and frequency metrics, such as online GRPs?

Eberly: I'm very interested in understanding frequency. Currently we know very little about how many exposures to an online ad are required to drive desired actions among specific demographic targets, but we're getting closer. I think it's essential for the industry to come up with reliable, proven metrics for reach and frequency.

iMedia Connection: What are the obstacles preventing your company from allocating more money to the marketing/advertising budget online?

Eberly: On a percentage basis, we spend virtually our entire budget online, but on a dollar basis the biggest obstacle to higher spending is a lack of publisher accountability. We believe strongly in testing, optimizing and then scaling, and we're willing to spend unlimited amounts of money once we determine we can do so effectively from a CPA perspective. We're fortunate in that we have a business model that allows us to ramp up spending significantly when we prove the effectiveness of the spend. So as publishers deliver against our plans we'll most likely increase our spending with them to the point of saturation, and I believe we're a long way from reaching that point. The key, however, is delivering against the plan specifics we want and not whatever is convenient for the publisher to deliver. If online publishers want to compare themselves against offline media options, they need to take seriously the notion of accountability and predictability. Simply delivering impressions is not enough for thoughtful planners and sophisticated marketers.