Bridging the offline-online divide
Advertisers often place commercials into two categories: brand or direct response. But in the long run -- and this is something that can be explained using TV as an example -- every brand campaign is a direct response campaign, only with a longer lag. For example, when a car company executes a brand campaign to create a retention-and-recall effect, it is also hoping that 10 years from now, someone who has grown up watching the campaign on television will buy that car. Thus the real difference between brand and direct response advertising is the longer lead time in measuring return on investment.
Why does this matter? Because it means that eventually even brand advertisers will want to measure ROI on their advertising spend and will care about metrics just as much as direct response advertisers currently do. The only question is: how to provide interim metrics until that eventual sale is completed? How do we correlate what an advertiser's target audience is seeing offline with what they are doing online? This is where measurement technology comes again into play.
Brand advertisers need to recognize the importance of traditional media and the internet's symbiosis. They should extract data on how the two media can not only interact with each other, but also how they can build off of each other in the long run. In a Thinkbox 2007 study, those exposed to an advertiser's campaign on TV and online in the same time period were 63 percent more likely to remember that brand. When people see an ad about a diamond company on television, that diamond company should then be able to cross reference online search data during that campaign's run to gauge and adjust its message.
We are still learning from the web's success, but we are making strides not only in taking the benefits of the online world and extending them to the television medium, but also in bridging the divide between the two media. In the end, delivering relevant ads to users, better measurability for advertisers, and revenue-generating opportunities for content creators will result in a win-win-win scenario every time.
Keval Desai is a director of product management at Google.
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