We need to know more about behavioral and contextual marketing before relying too heavily on them.

Julie Jeancolas is media director at Acceleration, a "results-oriented eMarketing services company." Acceleration helps clients with email marketing and campaign management, online media planning and buying, and search marketing .Clients include Land Rover (SA), Alamo Car Rental and WebMD.

iMediaConnection: What's your biggest frustration these days?

Jeancolas: Last year there was a proliferation of performance and affiliate networks that sell performance-based deals. Most of these companies don’t give you control over the media environment, and put reach before the quality of targeting. They see the sites within their network as a source of eyeballs, but don’t know what these eyeballs want to see. Reach is an important factor in lead generation programs, but targeting is even more essential to ensure high conversion rates and preserve the brand integrity.

iMediaConnection: What’s one of the most successful branding campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?

Jeancolas: Acceleration is not really involved in major branding campaigns. Our focus is lead generation and list build. Nevertheless, one knows that direct marketing conversion rates increase when backed up by an awareness/consideration objective. We notice that most of our lead generation campaigns generate better ROI if they are part of an integrated campaign. Data capture formats should be planned alongside branded and sponsored placements (newsletters, emails, white papers, etc.). This is true across all sectors, from B2B to consumer travel.

iMediaConnection: Can your company point to evidence that suggests online advertising and marketing are contributing positively to branding metrics?

Jeancolas: Without going into a Dynamic Logic branding effectiveness survey, here are a few elements to show the impact of online marketing on brand metrics:

• Awareness: Check how many people search for a brand keyword at the start of a campaign and at the end of the campaign. Check client site incoming traffic as a campaign rolls out.
• Consideration: Check the evolution of click-through rates through the online campaign. This will give you an idea of the evolution of the popularity of your brand.
• Preference: Compare conversion rates and online activity over time.
• Message Association: Check which brand keyword is leading people to your site, e.g. "Alamo" or "Alamo Rent A Car" or "Alamo Car Hire."

iMediaConnection: What’s one of the most successful direct response campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?

Jeancolas: Alamo Car Rental launched its UK Web site (alamo.co.uk) in January. We supported the launch with an online-only campaign from March 2003. Our objectives were to launch the Alamo UK Web site and generate awareness of the new online car rental site in a highly competitive sector. And to maximize the number of online reservations at the lowest acquisition cost possible.

We closely analyzed activities of Alamo’s competitors and recommended a strategic mix of online tactics with a diverse cost structure to deliver on each campaign goal (cost-per-thousand, cost-per-click and cost-per-reservation). The strategic planning revolved around consumer mindset, from intentional (search engines) to contextual placements (travel-related environments).

This strategy not only targeted the hot spots for car rentals, but reached a large volume of unique visitors.

The results: Within the first six months of the campaign, we substantially grew the number of online reservations. Between March and August the number of online registrations nearly tripled.

Added to this, the cost-per-reservation reduced week on week -- the aim is to halve it by the end of the year. In addition, the recent Hitwise ranking of the global travel transport sites in the UK placed Alamo well ahead of major competitors such as Budget, Avis and Hertz (for the week ending June 28, 2003, based on number of visits).

Why is it working? We love this account. The Web was made for travel bookings and we have developed the perfect mix of direct response and branding placements, together with in-depth analytics to make this channel a long-term winner for Alamo.

Third-party and in-house tracking software enables us to provide strategic information such as advertising-spend-per-reservation or average-revenue-generated-by-reservation across Alamo’s online mix. Through accurate and progressive monitoring we constantly maximize Alamo’s ROI.

We have also developed close and dynamic relationships with selected media partners. They understand our client’s business and show great flexibility to guarantee successful campaigns.

iMediaConnection: Have any of your clients successfully utilized any emerging technologies, such as IM, wireless, iTV, etc.?

Jeancolas: We currently concentrate on Web-based campaigns, including email. One hundred percent accountability and cross-channel measurement are of high importance to us. We will actively promote emerging technologies when these two criteria are met.

iMediaConnection: Are you working with search and local search for your clients? Why? And how's it going?

Jeancolas: We are currently using geo-targeting across different search engines but we haven’t had the chance to use local search as such. I think it could be very effective for retailers. Indeed it enriches consumers’ experience and increase the relevancy of search results, which should lead to higher conversion rates.

iMediaConnection: What are you telling your clients about rich media?

Jeancolas: We are currently using DFA ad-serving interface and are actively promoting MOTIF. We believe rich media should be used by most online marketers not for its creativity, but for its interactivity and the measurability of this interactivity. More than giving stand-out and increasing awareness, rich media is an essential tool to understand customers and deliver on their expectations. We tell our clients that the reason we collect data and analyze consumer interaction is to establish and deepen a relationship with their customers.

iMediaConnection: What can't the Internet do, as much as we wish it could?

Jeancolas: I cannot see any drawbacks, really. In a way the Web can be victim of its own success. Let’s take the example of consumer tracking. Technology enables us to track a Web user's surfing behavior in great details. Numerous companies already have a great amount of information (Claria, Dynamic Logic and soon companies like A9 with search history etc.), but how can marketers really use these data without invading their customer privacy?

iMediaConnection: How is the agency-seller relationship these days? How could it be better?

Jeancolas: Take risks and share them -- share campaign results and optimize. The media owner should not be seen as a third party, but as an extension of the media planner at the media property.

Media owners should act more like service providers rather than commodities suppliers. In the world of digital media, only 10 percent of the value is delivered prior to a client’s schedule approval. Very often agencies have more than 10 suppliers to deal with for a single media plan. Insertion order acceptance and signature, trafficking, campaign optimization and delivery are of vital importance and media owners should really focus on maximizing the success of their media inventory through optimum campaign coordination and implementation.

iMediaConnection: Are you having issues with Terms and Conditions?

Jeancolas: Yes, and one of our biggest frustrations is media owners not accepting our agency insertion order despite being based on the IAB guidelines.

iMediaConnection: Are you working with your clients' non-interactive agencies? How are you perceived -- as a partner or still as an oddity?

Jeancolas: Lots of our clients are agencies, and depending on the territory, they are more or less protective of their ad budget. But most non-interactive agencies understand that digital platforms are key to their client business, and if they don’t promote it themselves to their clients, it is their clients who one day will oblige them to put aside an online budget. The biggest worry for us is when non-interactive agencies try to develop an in-house digital offering and don’t deliver successful campaigns. This might drive potential customers away.

Most agencies are now being measured on the overall performance of integrated campaigns and are responsible for delivering the best ROI. It is in their interest to partner with digital agencies, and I think this is being understood.

iMediaConnection: What's the one thing you wish clients would understand?

Jeancolas: Digital media planning takes time -- it is not based on a two-day turnaround. Media inventory is scarce and a reasonable planning period is essential to secure best media placements and partnerships.

We understand that their imperative is to acquire customers at the lowest cost possible. But don’t sacrifice the media placements; it is worth investing more upfront to be in a high quality environment delivering better responses, hence better ROI.

iMediaConnection: What's the one thing you wish publishers would understand?

Jeancolas: As the Web becomes more measurable, clients demand a performance-based cost structure for their campaigns. They will not be willing to spend $5,000 on a CPM basis, but will have a no capped budget if they are offered a cost-per-action deal. Aren’t publishers confident enough in their audience?

iMediaConnection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?

Jeancolas: 1.) Planning tools -- Most directories are limited to major sites that get the biggest reach. The whole point of the Internet is to be able to target very niche markets with small audiences. These environments are never picked by planning tools. Couldn’t we use a contextual algorithm to grow online media databases? This will expand the available media inventory and could potentially give access to the digital platform to small marketers and increase the success of campaigns.

2.) Research -- For example, Dynamic Logic surveys measure brand metrics, but isn’t it more important to measure the effect of an online campaign on sales? Couldn’t we take this lift in purchase intent a step further by telling your client that it led to sale with a 1-month rather than 2-week lead time? We need research that focuses on ROI with growing clients’ business as an objective.

3.) Cross-media measurement to achieve a holistic view of consumers.

iMediaConnection: What are you reading these days?

Jeancolas: 'The End of Advertising as We Know It' by Sergio Zyman, 'Marketing And The Bottom Line' by Tim Ambler and Michael Moore's 'Dude, Where's My Country?'

iMediaConnection: And finally, tell us something we don't know yet, but that we will this year.

Jeancolas: Contextual and behavioral targeting are brilliant concepts but are not properly applied. When does contextual advertising work? When contextual ad providers work directly with publishers to insert their ads, rather than relying on software to insert such ads without publisher cooperation.

[We did an] opt-out of Google contextual program and we saw a rise in click rate and conversion rate. Volume did not even drop. How many people do you think you have to annoy in order to get 100 clicks from Gator [Claria] and WhenU? 1,000? 2,000? 20,000? And then from these clicks how many abandon their shopping cart? How much damage is done to your brand?

Contextual and behavioral targeting are only in their infancy. They will be taken a step further if:

• Consumers are 100 percent in control of what they receive
• Publishers protect their content and select the right third party (there are millions of Web sites broad or niche that will match any sector)
• Any Web site owner uses his Web analytics software to understand his visitors and contextualize each visit.