Media Director Brian Monahan is responsible for Universal McCann Interactive's online portion of integrated media plans stemming from McCann San Francisco. His clients include AMD, InFocus, Microsoft and Hotwire.
Monahan has 11 years of planning and buying media experience, starting as a television buyer for the Clinton/Gore 1992 campaign. As a traditional media planner, he contributed to accounts such as Nestle, Burger King and Transamerica. He has helped launch Amazon.com and Hotmail, among other lasting Internet brands. In 2000, Monahan was named "Internet Media Buyer of the Year," by Electronic Media Magazine.
Here, Monahan tells iMedia Connection that online advertising is moving slowly and steadily uphill in terms of obtaining recognition, awareness and a bigger piece of the advertising budget. In fact, he says it seems to have crossed a threshold.
iMedia Connection: What has been the biggest change you have experienced in the online advertising industry over the past year?
Brian Monahan: I'd say the biggest change has been recognition on behalf of stake holders that online is an important vehicle within a media mix to reach a target audience. Online is not thought of as a stand-alone marketing initiative from the rest of the media vehicles and there is a recognition of how target audiences are spending their time with media. And people are seeing that consumers are spending so much time on the Web, relative to other media, that it has become a critical way to reach them.
iMedia Connection: Has that recognition and awareness gone up dramatically or has it been a gradual incline?
Monahan: I think it has been pretty gradual but it seems to have crossed a certain threshold where online is not just kind of thought of as some marketing initiative that happens on some other floor, on some other building. It is part of my overall mix of touch points with my target.
I think interactive spending will continue its steady creep in terms of percent of overall ad budgets.
iMedia Connection: What is coming up in 2004? Are there any new challenges you see or challenges that may be resolved in the next year?
Monahan: I don't know if they will be resolved, but I think two issues will get a lot of attention. One is online media placements that accumulate mass reach. And two is leveraging broadband connections for a more effective message delivery.
They are challenges and at the same time, opportunities. We are spending more and more money on placements that can reach a large audience. The typical way that we buy and sell online is to sell at one impression at a time. And we are looking to buy placements that accumulate millions of unique users at once. So we are talking about road blocks on home pages that have high reach.
iMedia Connection: What have you found to be the most effective strategy in interactive marketing and have we fully maximized its potential?
Monahan: It's tough to give a sweeping generalization for direct response campaigns, but clearly search advertising has been really effective. And no, I don't think we've maxed that out yet by any means.
In terms of changing the way people feel about a product or lifting recall rates, we've found streaming video ads to be really effective. In terms of quickly covering an audience and accumulating target reach quickly, we've found 24-hour homepage roadblocks to be effective.
iMedia Connection: How have you integrated rich media into your campaigns and what kind of a response have you received from clients?
Monahan: If you include Flash in the definition of rich media, as DoubleClick does, just about 90% of our campaigns have rich media. Clients get very excited about rich media. I think everyone can look at the creative and see that it is better than a static unit. We do get push back from clients about production costs.
iMedia Connection: What do you do to help move traditional advertisers online?
Monahan: Three ways. The first way is showing clients the evidence that their target audience is online. Two is showing how online ads complement their media mix. And three is showing them performance data. Once they've started, we go to great lengths to show what our reach was, what our response was, what our recall rates were.
Performance data is like Crack -- clients are so hungry for evidence that their investment is working. That doesn't necessarily just mean click-through rates, but they love that information.
iMedia Connection: What recent campaign really proves the effectiveness of the interactive medium? Give an example and explain why.
Monahan: We did a campaign for Windows XP that was called, "The Amazing Windows Experiences Campaign." And we were looking to highlight different areas of functionality that come along with Windows XP, such as Windows media player, Windows movie maker and Windows messenger. And we did a lot of streaming video ads, 15 second pre-roll executions. When someone goes to click on some content, such as a movie trailer or music video, before they see the content they've requested, they sit through a 15-second ad. And we've found those executions to be really successful, both in the ability to lift somebody's awareness and also, surprisingly, to generate engagement. We found people were actually watching the video and they would kind of multi-task and respond to our ad in another window.
iMedia Connection: What is your priority over the next year and what will you and your company be doing about it?
Monahan: We spend a lot of energy trying to accurately forecast the reach and frequency of our campaigns. That is the language by which we can make our case for our share of the overall media budget. We haven't really found any of the software tools on the market to really suit our needs when it comes to that, so we've spent a lot of time building our own library of reach curves. So I would imagine that we would continue to really focus on that, and get better at forecasting reach and frequency of our clients' campaigns.
iMedia Connection: What is your current passion related to online advertising or do you have an opinion that you would like to express?
Monahan: My passion is that the impression-based media currency we use is a media currency not useful for planning and only suited for direct response advertising. If we really want this medium to join the family of other media, we need an audience-based currency of buying and selling online advertising.
