In this wrap-up of a panel discussion in February, the panelists give publishers advice.

This panel discussion took place at February's iMedia Brand Summit in Florida. Doug Weaver, President, Upstream Group, moderated. Panelists were Gerard Broussard, Senior Partner and Director of Media Analytics for mOne, and John Nardone, Executive Vice President - Product Development and Marketing at Marketing Management Analytics (MMA).

Monday, the group defined Marketing Mix Modeling. Tuesday, they contemplated interactive's effect when it gets the smallest portion of the spending, and yesterday they discussed whether interactive does work, and for whom. Here's the rest:

Doug Weaver: I'll take a question.

Allen Weiss: I'm Allen Weiss from MarketingProfs.com. I'm just kind of curious in terms of the state of the art with this econometric modeling as it relates to the internet. Because from a consumer behavior standpoint, where people use the internet as a support device, for say, some of the other things that they're buying, to what extent are the models taking indirect effects [because] maybe they don't pop necessarily just for sales, but they're actually popping in terms of the indirect effect that they have on other variables that do pop.

Gerard Broussard: Right.

Weaver: It sounds like the interrelationship of media within the plan. Maybe the internet is the Hamburger Helper in that plan that's making everything work well?

Broussard: Yeah. Yeah. It has to do with the role of media. It could be the internet is the last stop before somebody makes a decision on whether to purchase or not, especially for high consideration products. Now, if you change your metric from sales to let's say, the level right before sales, let's say high consideration for a product, you might yield a better result from the internet activity because you're that far down the purchase consideration set or pipe, right before the sale. So there is a chance or an opportunity to model some intermediary metrics that lead to sales, that I think could be very interesting and we should explore that.

John Narbone: Gerard, we've begun to do exactly that. We've just launched a new modeling service that pulls your qualitative brand tracking data -- and sort of purchase intent, consideration, awareness -- into an integrated marketing mix model. And what the model shows is how your marketing tactics influence end sales, but then the route by which those sales are influenced, through awareness to purchase, intent and so forth. And what you get is an output -- it actually looks kind of like a subway map, so that you can actually see what we call the hierarchy of effects of the different media on the precursors to sales. It's a lot more involved of an analysis than a traditional marketing mix. But several of our clients are very, very excited by the findings from that because it gives new insight in terms of the path they take to affecting sales.

Weaver: We've got time for one more question then I have a closing question.

Go ahead.

Craig Calder: Hi, Craig Calder, Dart Motif. John, you mentioned that it's often helpful to aggregate all your online efforts into one, but one of our biggest questions from our customers is "How do I find the most effective mix in my online media?" And, have you guys done anything to help advertisers figure out, you know, what's the right amount of email, search, rich media to combine into my media plan to be most effective?

Narbone: What we advise clients, Craig, is to work backwards through your traditional digital metrics and say, where -- when you sort of map out the user experience, what's the point of leverage? Is it the website? If it's a high consideration purchase, that's probably the point of leverage. And then you look back through your online advertising, your search and your email and say: "Which of those tactics is contributing to getting people to that point of leverage?" And then you can do some pretty quick back of the envelope calculations and determine what the most effective or cost-efficient ways to get people to that point of leverage are. So that's one way of doing it.

Another thing we've been able to do for some clients where the digital stuff really does pop, is pull things apart and measure them separately, and look at email separate from online advertising. And for financial services and retail, sometimes we can read those things separately.

Weaver: Okay. Gerard?

Broussard: We haven't really decomposed the internet econometrically that way. But to John's point, we do often take the bottoms-up approach and go back to the digital metrics like how much search is feeding into regeneration and banners and email and so on, and come up with a relative share of spend within each of the three major channels within the internet. If a client asks us how high up for spend on the internet, which they often do, we'll go to those metrics in the absence of econometric solutions. And we'll tell them that in some cases -- in the last case we had, for example, which was a telecommunications company, they could have doubled or tripled their budget without lowering their cost efficiency investment. So that's the way we approach it.

Weaver: Okay. Just to close things out, I have one question here. Because I know that we focused a lot on the best practices and the tips and strategies, obviously on the marketers here because traditionally they're the ones who are going to use the tools. But clearly, all the publisher and media company representatives here are going to go back to the office and their staffs will gather around their feet and say "Tell me about that marketing mix modeling panel. What did you learn?" And I want some takeaway for the publishers.

So, Gerard, you mentioned the idea of publishers sometimes stepping into the breach with some of their own data to support the internet. You mentioned Yahoo! and Consumer Direct. Talk to the publishers about what they can do in this world of modeling to supplement that knowledge with their own data. And I'll get you both to answer that and then we'll close up.

Broussard: Well, in the absence of econometric results for the internet, I did mention before the Yahoo! Consumer Direct program, which has been pretty successful with a couple of our clients. That's actually -- for those of you who are unaware of it, they team up with the AC Nielson Company which collects packaged goods' household data. And then they're able to isolate people who are on the panel, on the AC Nielson panel, that are also people that they advertise to on Yahoo! and then they compare the people that they target with the specific advertising to those that they don't. And they see if there is a change in sales effect. With one of our clients we had pretty good success with that and it went over very nicely at the brand management meeting.
The other thing to do is -- some of the research that has been done out there in cross media certainly is not a substitute for econometrics, but it's a good snapshot in time to show the internet's viability as an element in the mix that is important, and that does work. And also to, I would say to the potential advertiser, that we realize that we may not always show up in the econometric model mix, but we definitely have an effect -- and maybe point back to some digital metrics that are more direct-response oriented. And that as the budgets improve on the internet, there should be a mergence of the effect in econometrics. You're just going to have to keep at it, but the best thing to do is to recognize that the problem exists and that to just try to stay with what you've been doing now, and then just plan for the future, that it will show up in the merge.

Weaver: John?

Narbone: The message I would give to publishers is: Go to the industries and clients that are spending with you and push them to do econometric modeling, because in the end that’ll justify a bigger share of spend. 

I was with the head of sales for one of the major search engines whose business relies on selling search terms and the challenge was "What can I do to penetrate the CPG space?" And I said to them, I wouldn't bother doing that; I'd go back to the folks who were spending a lot of money with you and I would pay for marketing mix analyses for those companies, because you can put a very hard ROI number on the search results, or the search keywords for those companies, but they're probably not getting anywhere near that ROI for their other marketing measures. If you can show them that, more money will flow to you. I think that's probably what I would say. 

Marketers are pretty smart. They know what makes sense in terms of where to put their money. The challenge is to get more of that share for where it does make sense and not push so hard into areas where they don't think it does.

Weaver: When the iMedia Advisory Board for the Summit asked me to take on this panel assignment and explore this topic, these were the first two guys called. And I think you can see why.

Please thank John and Gerard for a great panel [Applause].