You don't have to head to the Big Apple for great online advertising.

Erin Borkowski is a Media Supervisor with TBC, a full-service marketing communications firm in Baltimore. She has been with the company for six years and helped establish TBC's Interactive division in 1998.  She is responsible for developing and implementing media strategies for both traditional and interactive clients and manages the Interactive media group within the agency. TBC's Interactive clients include The Wall Street Journal Online, Dow Jones, Gaylord Hotels, and AOPA.

iMedia Connection: What's your biggest frustration these days?

Borkowski: Advertisers think they need to go to New York to get great online advertising.
Also, people often associate interactive expertise with Web site design, and it’s so much more than that. I think people don’t understand the depths of this discipline and all that we can offer in terms of creative latitude, media opportunities and in-depth performance analysis.

iMedia Connection: What's easier this year than last?

Borkowski: We don’t have to work as hard to convince clients that online advertising makes sense.  They realize the Internet is a huge component of a consumer’s daily media mix, and we are able to provide them with enough success stories to demonstrate that online advertising achieves results. 

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

Borkowski: Our campaigns to date have been more direct response oriented, although I do believe that even response-generating online campaigns help build brand awareness.

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

Borkowski: We have not specifically conducted any awareness benchmark studies connected to online efforts, but the ultimate branding metric is revenue, and our campaigns have delivered great trackable ROI. Our campaigns tend to have direct response goals, but through the introduction of post-impression/view-through tracking, we are able to see that even our direct response campaigns have branding impact. With our most recent subscription sales efforts for WSJ.com, we’ve seen that 65% of their subscription orders each month are attributed to users that saw our advertising but did not click and instead came back to the site at a later date to order the product. This is a great testament to the branding value of online.

iMedia Connection: What’s one of the most successful “DR” campaigns your company has executed recently, and what made it successful?
 
Borkowski: One of our most successful DR campaigns was for the Maryland Office of Tourism. We utilized a combination of paid search, dynamic creative units such as Superstitials and Eyeblasters, and a contextual media strategy. Our creative merchandised unique Maryland vacation attributes, offering a strong call to action, and ran outside of the cluttered travel vertical, within compatible environments that offered synergy with the client’s traditional advertising efforts, such as HistoryChannel.com, FoodNetwork.com, and BHG.com. The audience was able to better pre-qualify themselves, and MD attracted a respondent more likely to register for a travel kit and become a “warm” prospect.  Over the course of two years, the cost-per-lead was reduced from $12 to $.50, and travel kit order volume rose by 10,000%, from 198 to 19,875.

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

Borkowski: We’ve explored these options for some of our clients but have not found them to be best suited for meeting the objectives of the direct response and traffic driving campaigns we have been running. While appropriate for some strategies at this time, they don’t offer the reach or creative latitude we can get through traditional online advertising for our clients’ needs.

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

Borkowski: Search is a component of the majority of our online marketing efforts. We use it because search is the most popular use of the Internet behind email, and we’ve found it to be an incredibly cost-efficient method of obtaining qualified traffic and ultimately, customers.  Because of its CPC pricing, it’s low risk and an easier sell for transitioning clients into the medium. And quite simply, it works -- whether a client is interested in generating cost-efficient site visitation, lead generation, or product sales, we’ve been able to use search to meet these objectives. Local search has not come into play for any clients yet, but as the product evolves it may prove to be a good fit for some of our local/regional clients.

iMedia Connection: What are you telling your clients about rich media?

Borkowski: We see better response rates when we use rich media. It allows for more dynamic advertising that increases user interaction and allows us to tell a better story and reach more qualified prospects.

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

Borkowski: The Internet continues to evolve like no other medium, so the things we’d like to be possible probably will be in the near future. It’s easy to find the flaws in any medium, but I am still amazed by how online allows us to engage, enroll, analyze and remarket customers all through a single channel at a fraction of the cost of traditional direct mail campaigns.

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

Borkowski: The agency-seller relationship has evolved quite a bit in the last few years.  Overall, both buyers and sellers are more knowledgeable about the online space and have more years of experience behind them. But there are still plenty of sellers out there not doing the research and providing the information we need to help us with our planning. 

iMedia Connection: Are you having issues with terms and conditions?

Borkowski: Occasionally. Our primary issues with Ts and Cs are in regard to serving discrepancies and sequential liability. Some sites are still unwilling to accept the standard discrepancy terms established by the IAB, while others will not work with AAAA’s sequential liability clause. We can usually compromise, but it is frustrating that industry standards cannot be determined and followed.

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

Borkowski: TBC is a full-service agency, and we’ve been doing interactive long enough now (since 1998) that the interactive group is fully integrated with the rest of the agency.  Those of us immersed in the day to day still get the odd glance when we throw around some of the terminology, but by now so many of our clients have entered the online space that we’re no longer regarded as a separate entity.

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

Borkowski: Online advertising is a very time-consuming medium, but agencies often are not compensated accordingly. Researching sites and formats can be an exhaustive process, as is the day-to-day analysis and optimization. Being able to track advertising delivery and attributing leads and sales directly to advertising is extremely valuable, but gathering this learning is also very time-consuming, and agencies should be compensated accordingly.

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

Borkowski: Sometimes what they are offering is just not the right fit for what I need to accomplish. It would be nice if publishers could be our partners, proposing those initiatives that truly make the most sense for my client’s needs.

iMedia Connection: What remains the industry’s biggest stumbling block?

Borkowski: Standardization. Despite the IAB’s guidelines, there is still not consistency in format acceptance and ad specs. We have quite a few clients advertising on sites that aren’t the largest publishers, in more niche/ b-to-b environments, and in those settings, online advertising can be a very arduous process- there’s virtually no uniformity in terms of ad sizes, specs, third party acceptance, etc. Ultimately, the inconsistencies cost everyone time and money.

iMedia Connection: What are you reading these days?

Borkowski: As far as trades, WSJ.com and The Wall Street Journal, MediaLifeMagazine, MediaPost, iMediaConnection, MediaWeek, Ad Age, and AdWeek. For leisure, Cooking Light and Entertainment Weekly plus any comp magazines that make their way into the media department. I’ve also started making my way through all the classics I was never forced to read in high school.

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

Borkowski: More and more sites will adopt WSJ.com and NYTimes.com’s model and offer behavioral targeting opportunities.