iMedia Brand Summit panelists talk about the significance of an MSN Media Accountability Study (part 2of 3).

At September's iMedia Brand Summit, Mediasmith president David Smith led a panel discussion around the findings of an MSN Media Accountability Study. The study, conducted by MSN in conjunction with Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution, analyzed the online component of ad campaigns conducted by Nestlé's Coffee-Mate and Kraft's Jell-O brands and found that the Web can provide media impact equal to or better than other media effective at branding.

On the panel were Briggs; Carole Walker, director, e-Communications, Advertising & Strategy at Kraft; and Todd Manion, Manager, E-Business & Consumer Relationship Management at Nestle USA. Thursday, Smith presented the topline findings, and panelists revealed how they've impacted their brands. In this second third of the transcript , the panelists talk about the significance of the study. You can view the presentation here. 

David Smith: Rex. Fifteen hundred studies have been done since '96, '97, on the efficacy of online. That's a lot. The industry has done a lot of breakthrough stuff but it was in some ways criticized as being maybe a little too theoretical, yet four or five years ago there was some sales research similar to this and nobody picked up on it. What makes this different from the sales research that's been done before or from that point?

Rex Briggs: That's a great question. I was fortunate enough to be involved in that early sales measurement five years ago, as was my partner, Ethan. He actually helped execute that for P&G. It comes down to a couple of key ideas. For one, the early research studies looked at online in isolation. The early ad effectiveness studies looking at branding were looked at in isolation and so were the sales studies. And that's a mistake. You have to look at it in the context of the marketing mix and I think that's really what the breakthrough of XMOS was, and by extension, this research, by integrating all the sales, you have it in context with the overall marketing plan.

The second big breakthrough is really the pushing to sales, which obviously gets people beyond purchase intention and gets them to sales. Frankly these studies will simply just make our sales -- our purchase intention metrics -- better so you don't always have to do these really extensive sales studies, but that is an important breakthrough that as Carole mentioned, gives it credibility.

And the third and the last most important point is the fact that we approached this not just about the data but as a process of consulting and working with the organization and integrating in with the brand managers and the senior analytic teams and all the companies they do work with. Then, they planned an area before they ever saw data: how you interact with different outcomes, and that planning process, I think, makes a world of difference. I think those three points are what makes this different in this new breed of research that's coming up.

Todd Manion: If I can just build on that for a second. We've been prophesizing for a long time in our organization, and I think when it comes from us people just start turning their heads because they're used to hearing it from us.

But what happened in this situation is the brand team got involved and our research people got involved and they're now presenting it to their peer groups within our organization. So, it's finally gotten to the point where we're not sitting around telling everyone what they expect to hear from us, but they're hearing it from other people in the organization, saying the same thing that we've been saying for three years. So that's what really starts the momentum at an organization because it's coming not just from the e-business person or the CRM person, it's coming from within other groups about this information.

Smith: When we were talking yesterday, one of the things, Todd, that you had mentioned that made you feel good about the data is it was not a small sample size; there were tens of thousands of people involved…

Manion: Yes, I mean -- that was one question, we hadn't agreed to quote the final number in terms of people -- but yeah, the sample size was large enough for us to look at and it had tremendous credibility with our organization to the point that they're allowing us to present it to our entire marketing organization for all the different companies. So, in order to do that it goes through the tedious process of the research to make sure that it's valid. 

Carole Walker: The same exact thing happened at Kraft. In fact, not only did we have CIS research group, we had the branding group, the divisional research group, and I remember one day when early findings were being presented, they actually brought out a textbook of analytics and started to debate over some of the methodology, so this really got a lot of analysis and a lot of involvement.

Smith: When we looked at it with other media and of course, as they say, your mileage may vary for any given brand, and we picked two brands here and the results were significantly different from one medium versus another. Online still did very well in both situations. But when you're talking about changing media mixes, well, where are the dollars going to come from? Are they going to be new dollars, are they going to be dollars that are going to come out of consumer promotion, are they dollars that come out of television or newspaper or what area? Carole?

Walker: Good question. I think they're coming from across the board for the most part. I think that because the traditional media are so very efficient and effective, those dollars are not going to go away. As long as they're working, we're going to maintain them. Where we're really driving integration is in the creative. Such that it's not the same piece of creative on television versus trade magazines and online but it's really the same idea, and I think that's what's really happening in our case. But no, we're not seeing trade dollars move over to Internet advertising, if that's what you're wondering.

Smith: And Todd, yesterday the headline in Ad Age said that you guys are looking with a finer microscope against consumer promotions and that area. Is that where these dollars are coming from or are they across the board also?

Manion: Well first off, there's not more money, there's never more money. I think what happens is that we are looking at all our different vehicles and -- we had this conversation yesterday -- for our particular mediums, be it relationship marketing, be it the online, we do measure so much and I know a couple of people yesterday said, "I don't think we need measurements." Unfortunately, for our industry, everything is measured and we're measured to scrutiny that the other mediums are not, so we are going to look at all these other mediums based on the results of the measurements that we're getting, to the point where what is different about this is we were able to take this study and track it to transactional data. So that we can actually see what was the lift on Coffee-Mate of 10 percent, so we could look at history based on an aggregate level, not on a personal level, but aggregate level from retail shopper information, frequent shopper data, to see where consumers were "prior" and where they were "post." And now that we're actually able to truly measure -- this is the growth that we have from that -- a 10 percent growth on a brand that's been around for quite some time, is pretty significant.

So the dollars are being shifted in each one of the different groups, and like you said yesterday, [hypothetically] moving 120 million dollars from national TV, now that's a pretty big number. We don't have those types of budgets for that particular brand, but we are moving dollars away from national television.

Smith: Rex, you were talking to me earlier about the board results and while we didn't have the space to put the board results up today, those were another case -- the Ford F150 -- of a mature brand with a significant impact. Why don't you summarize those for the group?

Briggs: We've been doing the same type of sales links that we're doing in PVG across a lot of different categories. Obviously this is one that's very exciting, and what we're able to find is that about 6 percent of the total vehicles sold over a period of time could be directly traced back to online advertising. Not people that clicked through -- that's in addition to the 6 percent. This is purely looking at the online advertising.

And that -- when we looked at the ROI part, the best ROI was coming from online advertising. So in that case they were looking at re-allocation. It's always a challenge because TV has been bid up in price, but if you pull back your TV you also see our results drop pretty quickly, so it's a real challenge to figure out how to shift dollars around, but the clear indication is that online is making a significant contribution to the bottom line and should be a larger part of the marketing mix.

Smith: And the awareness uptake was in the neighborhood of 9 percent as I recall, for Ford…

Briggs: Yeah, you did a good job of showing a standard chart for a way to think about the result both in terms of branding and sales, so it's two dimensions. And we saw both strong branding performance and strong sales performance, and that's when you know you have a winner. If you only see one side or the other side, you still have to go back and do more work, and so Ford clearly has very strong contributions, actually across magazines, television and online, and both online and magazine were particularly cost-efficient. But online got top-of-level awareness all the way down to individual beliefs about what the product delivered in terms of brand industry, like quieter interior or better payload capacity, all the way to people actually buying a truck.

Tomorrow: What's in the future for these brands and more from Rex Briggs.