The agency president & CEO details media placement evaluations, and describes the agency of the future.

Gay Gaddis is the President and founder of T3 (The Think Tank), an integrated marketing services firm and idea factory with a range of regional, national and global clients including Dell Inc., Marriott International, Inc., JCPenney, MSN, i3 Research, Nortel Networks, Spheris and Despair.com. Gaddis founded T3 in 1989 and has since built the company into the largest privately held agency wholly owned by a woman in the country. Committed to making T3 the most innovative agency in the nation, she drives the company’s business philosophy -- smart people doing smart things.

iMedia: What has been the biggest change that you have experienced in the online advertising industry over the past year?

Gaddis: The shift in budget from offline advertising to online has been the most significant change I’ve seen. More budget dollars for online has allowed more innovative thinking and enhanced creative with Rich Media. More dollars equals more creativity.

iMedia: What do you hope to accomplish or try this year?

Gaddis: I hope to continue to create an environment for my agency that fosters innovation and creativity. We seek to add at least one new service a year based on client need.

iMedia: How do you evaluate media placements?

Gaddis: Our approach to evaluating media is both methodical and based on the experience and creativity of the media team.

When T3 evaluates media we first define the role of advertising by setting the communications strategy and defining the media objectives. The media objective is developed by analytically evaluating all marketing input. We prioritize each objective and determine budget-appropriate strategies that will help accomplish the set goals. The media objective ultimately should be quantifiable and held against defined success metrics such as ROI, increased brand awareness, cost per acquisition, etc.

We identify who to target using demographics and psychographics and then determine the size of the target universe.

There are a number of media solutions in today’s marketplace that require a deep understanding of consumer media habits. Because of this, we use research to define media usage habits by target audience. For example, how much and which internet sites are consumed by the desired target audience. Media mix is also driven by short-term and long-term objectives. Consideration is also given to the overall clutter in the marketplace and the need for impact.

We then evaluate what the effective levels will be to achieve the set goals. For instance, when driving brand awareness we quantify our goals in terms of reach, frequency and effective frequency. For ecommerce, we set the desired return on investment and project out conversions through historical performance or through utilizing prototyped metrics from similar campaigns.

T3 strongly believes that research and quantifiable results are extremely important when evaluating media. We do, however, feel that qualitative criteria such as editorial relevance, quality of content, positioning, technology acceptance and the uniqueness of the media opportunity are just as important. T3 strives to engage with media properties that will provide exclusive, distinctive and creative opportunities in order to set apart our clients’ advertising.

iMedia: What needs to be done internally as well as in partnership with the clients to better coordinate integrated marketing efforts?

Gaddis: We've been integrated as far as the services we offer for the past seven years, and we're now starting to see a movement of clients that are integrating more of their programs together. It’s been difficult for clients to move toward integration because there are often financial incentives for each group or department to succeed on their own. Working across the different media has also presented challenges for clients. It’s our job to provide solutions to these problems which also make financial sense.

iMedia: Behavioral targeting is a hot topic. Are you using it for any of your clients? How and what have the results been like?

Gaddis: We have been using behavioral targeting in our email programs and the results have been very positive. By moving to a behavioral targeting approach versus a product or sales approach, we have been able to increase email response rates by 28 percent for one of our technology clients. This approach has also yielded a significant decrease in users unsubscribing.

iMedia: Are any of your clients being affected by any consumer-generated marketing (CGM) -- blogs, user groups, etc.? Are they using any blogs or other social networking tools to market?

Gaddis: The clients we are currently involved with are not being affected by consumer-generated marketing. Some clients do use blogs and other social networking tools, but at this time we have no direct involvement with them.

iMedia: Are analytics getting any easier? Where do you see this aspect of online marketing going?

Gaddis: Significant advancements have been made in the past five years and I only see more improvements on the horizon. Clients are focused on return on investment and want to see measured results. This has pushed analytics to the front of campaigns and forced developments in tracking behaviors online. It is now much easier to see what a user is doing. Even if a user does not click on the ad, we can see that they moused over elements in the ad or interacted with it before they even get to the advertiser’s website. Data is everywhere and now the real challenge is not in the tracking, but in the analysis and the conclusions.

iMedia: We recently asked Brands what they thought the future of advertising agencies is. Want to weigh in on the topic? What do you think agencies' greatest role will be moving forward?

Gaddis: In talking to our clients and at conferences around the country, there is a fundamental shift going on in communications and marketing. The consumer is now in control through the internet, PDAs and cell phones. The old annually planned, mass-media-dominated marketing programs are gone.

Our role as an agency will be to provide clients’ customers the new-new: multiple inter-related messages, in multiple formats, in multiple media. All measurable, all adjusting and morphing as consumer interest and marketing conditions change. It’s communication that informs, entertains and brands. It’s communication that screams for new ideas and new approaches to creativity.

iMedia: What are brands still not getting about interactive marketing?

Gaddis: Even though we’re seeing a positive shift in online budget spending, there’s still a concern about who drives the creative concepts. Many brands revert back to the TV model and attempt to shoehorn television creative to interactive. TV and print campaigns are an important part of the brand media mix, but do not always translate across all media, especially online.

iMedia: What marketing or business books do you most recommend?

Gaddis: “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell and “How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life” by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton. “How Full is Your Bucket” is interesting because it ties interactive with the print medium.