For an industry that is considered progressive and labels itself "new media," it's certainly locked into an archaic, catch-all metric, the click, which measures only a menial part of a consumer's senses, focusing on one action, dismissing all aspects related to influence (think, feel, sense, imagine and interact). Clicks have very little to do with exposure to creative and largely ignore a user's emotional connectivity to a brand. Simply put, clicks only measure one response, which we generally assume is a positive indication of intent, but it is a long way from the suitable conversion point an advertiser seeks.
Advertising at its core is about reaching out to the senses to captivate the imagination, influence an action or change a perception by enhancing consumers' desire. Here enters multimodal perception, a notion based on the idea that humans use multiple senses to learn, sight being the strongest, followed by sound and touch. It is a combination of senses that helps us to build a bigger picture of the world around us.
Marketers are beginning to measure this sensory engagement across media channels by looking at specific touch points along the consumer's path to conversion and not just focusing on the immediate action of the user on any given single exposure.
Digital has afforded marketers the means to stimulate multiple senses through interactivity in a variety of virtual scenarios, from TV screens in the back of cabs, to digital billboards in Times Square, to floating billboards along the Hangsu River in Shanghai, users chatting with the actual developers at Intel inside online banners, or talking to President Obama via Webcam.
Focusing on time spent at each key touch point of a user's digital experience allows marketers to obtain a scalable metric -- even a potential combined exposure per consumer, per campaign across all media -- that concisely can answer advertisers concerns and objectives with consumer awareness. In turn, this can be followed by other subsequent behaviors such as triggering search, or further exploration or communication.
Taking time-based measurement into account, the recent launch of a metric for online display advertising, coined Dwell Time, attempts to isolate those who see and subsequently interact with a creative as opposed to those passively exposed, and offers a positive viable alternative to clicks by measuring the time spent exposed exploring any given brand. The utopia for time-based measurement is to measure the total time spent exposed across all media channels as well as the total time spent engaging per campaign.
When a user spends time consuming an online ad -- it is clear to see that adding video to your online campaign can significantly improve your marketing results. Marketers are responding in kind with a larger slice of their advertising budgets.
What makes online video advertising so successful? Simple -- it engages more senses and draws in the consumer. A recent study, Online Video Advertising: Doubles Engagement, Boosts ROI, found that video advertising growth has outpaced rich media growth by 60 percent in the last three-and-a-half years and doubled dwell time. Furthermore, the study found that rollover user-initiated video performed best, followed by auto-initiated video. Click user-initiated ads performed the worst.
These statistics certainly show that one thing is for sure: the key to defining measurement needs to be closely linked to human physiology and the multi-modal behavior of consumers, not a simple, one click solution. The answer is to develop a series of metrics along the consumer's touch points that indicate intent. Indeed, it seems that "time" is the most adaptive measurement across multiple media channels and should be a primary consideration when advertisers analyze the effectiveness of any campaign.
A link to the research is here.
Carolyn Bollaci is country manager, Australia & New Zealand, for Eyeblaster.
