It must be a familiar scene at marketing meetings around Southeast Asia: after setting aside the budget for print, TV and bus ads, someone in the team asks "shall we spend what's left of it online -- just as a test?"
This gets a "favourable" reply from the boss: "Okay, but make sure you get clear ROI (return on investment) in the form of page views."
Therein lies the irony about online marketing in the region: even as experts talk up strategies to engage consumers in new Web 2.0 services such as social networking sites, many companies are still coming to grips with their efforts for Web 1.0.
Page views, an early, unsophisticated way of measuring effectiveness, has stuck on as the default method to access the success of online campaigns, which are still a poor step-sister to traditional marketing in the region.
While online advertising is around 15 to 20 percent of total advertising spend in the United States, the internet's share of the pie is a meagre 2 to 5 per cent in Singapore, despite it being the most net-savvy in Southeast Asia.
The reason is simple. While advertisers in the US and Europe have developed more sophisticated online campaigns that deliver not just page views, but deep brand loyalty, direct sales and other marketing objectives, many Southeast Asian advertisers still see online efforts through the lens of traditional marketing.
While a good campaign these days is based on "360-degree" marketing -- a well-thought out combination of both online and offline marketing -- many advertisers dabbling with the internet for the first time often see them as separate and incompatible.
As such, the amazing possibilities online -- deeper customer participation, for one -- are often lost on advertisers in the region. Well, at least until mindsets start changing.
The first thing that needs to change is the idea of ROI. Ever since page views and click-throughs became a way of measuring how popular a banner advertisement was in the 1990s, the concept has stuck on for many advertising executives.
It is understandable. After all, cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition (to get a customer to sign up for a service, for example) is similar to the traditional cost-per-million measurement that advertisers have used for decades to measure the reach of an advertisement in a newspaper.
Problem is, with this mindset, many advertisers end up running online campaigns that are mainly "performance-based" or ones that call for a "direct response", say, to sign up for a seminar or book a hotel room.
What advertisers here are only starting to understand is that online offers far more than these "direct response" types of advertisements. Indeed, all the four Ps of marketing --product, pricing, placement and promotion -- can be achieved online.
Think promotion, for example. While there is no direct call to action in some cases, a branding campaign online can work wonders for a company looking to solidify its user base and seek new customers.
A simple banner advertisement for a burger joint, appearing next to a related food review site, can form an instant association with a foodie.
The same can be said of search-related advertisements, which appear next to what a user is looking for online. Even if he does not click on an advertisement of your burger store now, the link has been made with an interested party, who is more likely to remember the store when he next goes out for a burger.
In these cases, a simple measurement of page views and click-throughs do not tell the whole story. To see the real ROI, advertisers have to use yardsticks such as top-of-mind brand recall and conduct focus group studies to get subjective opinions from consumers.
These traditional tools, of course, are nothing new to marketers anywhere. They just have to apply the same yardsticks to an online campaign as they would to a traditional one.
This is what Yahoo! did in Vietnam recently, when it ran a branding campaign that used both online and traditional media, with a 360 approach in mind.
After the campaign, studies showed that the Yahoo brand jumped from 28 percent to a cool 50 percent, in terms of top-of-mind recall, a measurement of how well people remember a brand.
Companies looking to advertise online should consider a holistic 360 approach as well. The key: leveraging the strengths of both traditional media and online channels.
One example: run teaser advertisements in the newspapers to prompt readers to search for, say, your company's brand of cereal or milk online.
When they do so, they can be directed to a micro-site to get to know not just your product but also the benefits of eating well for breakfast. Print gets the message to the masses, while online offers a more engaging, interactive experience.
Another way: adapt content for both traditional and online media. A compelling TV commercial on the goggle box can be made interactive on the net, say, in the form of a game, to keep participants interested in a brand.
Indeed, a 360 campaign is the surest way forward, as consumers spend more time staring at internet websites besides reading newspapers and watching TV.
In Singapore, 83 percent of people interviewed in 2007 said they watched TV "a day ago", while 77.3 percent read the newspapers. Both figures were down from 2006, when 86.8 percent watched TV and 78.3 percent read newspapers, according to the Nielsen Media Index.
In contrast, internet usage is growing fast, despite having a smaller audience. Those who went online "a week ago" when interviewed grew from 54.4 percent in 2006 to 57.6 percent in 2007.
To reach out effectively to these consumers, advertisers have to come up with more sophisticated campaigns that span different media and attract users to participate in more engaging ways.
But this can only happen when marketers think beyond cost-per-click or cost-per-acquisition for their online campaigns. Instead, measurement could be a combination of cost-per-click and cost-per-million, to reflect the different channels and their roles.
From the start, marketers have to pencil in the internet as part of their marketing strategy. In doing so, companies might have to spend more than just leftovers from a budget to reach out on a growing internet user base in Southeast Asia, which is estimated to be 35 million in the next four years.
If that happens, we could see internet advertising in the region mature into a truly compelling channel to connect with one's customers.
Bennett Porter is head of marketing for Yahoo! Emerging Markets & Queen Bee Emeritus.
