With the holiday season looming upon us and in the midst of all this talk of credit-crunch and cutting budgets, the pressure seems to be on the digital industry right now to find answers to help assure confidence. Fortunately, Eyeblaster’s latest Analytics Bulletin seems to be helping do just that.

Bringing the perspective that with the average household being a bit strapped for cash at the moment, the need to hunt for a bargain is ensuring more and more people take to the web to uncover the last minute find to be had.

With a shift of emphasis from mere clicks as a way of justifying success, the report takes its perspective of this bargain hunt and helps show how online activity is a key part of a consumer’s experience in information gathering post-exposure to a marketing message, be that on or offline.

What I found interesting is, when looking at the key dates in the run up to the New Year we see a couple of spikes, one around the last-posting days for sending presents as people spend huge amounts of time online, and then in the traditional last holiday week of the year – when sales are rife. Consumers are spending up to 3 minutes per page looking for information and that means from a marketers perspective, the ability for high-impact brand exposure can be 6x the traditional 30 second TV spot, and within an environment where consumers are already in a consideration-to-purchase mode. The evidence is also seen in the number of videos started, interactions and clicks rising sharply as a result of this extra time spent on page, with no extra media cost.

With inquiry being a natural next step in the consumer life cycle following brand/product exposure, I personally find the move to merge display and search data into a seamless report the most exciting turning point for the online industry and convinced 2008 will go down as a key moment of maturity for digital advertising. Armed with ability to now see consumer paths-to-conversion, Eyeblaster has not been shy in releasing its first research into this area. The preliminary results have found staggeringly that up to 30% of clicks on paid searches happen as a result of being exposed to an online display advert first. When we consider no other media channel expects to measure an immediate result in situation, such as a click, but operate as a stop-and-think sign-post which pushes a consumer into a research/inquiry phase from another source, finding results for a display campaign success within search are for me the most logical and holistic way forward in campaign measurement.

In a media-whipped world of doom and gloom, one thing is for sure, people are looking forward to a Happy Holiday armed with bargains they have found online. In the meantime, for the rest of us who need to instil confidence in the market-place to maintain media budgets, we have been crying out for this kind of research, and I am confident those who are mature in digital advertising will equally take such a view.

Download your copy of the Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin: Branding the Holidays now.

Lucy Weldon, Digital Strategy Director, Burrows

My muse best comes when:  Watching how my friends, family and I behave as consumers.  It’s often something we don’t see or apply to our thinking, but it’s such a simple and important point.  Studying Psychology has certainly helped to bring human interaction and behavior to the forefront of my thinking, but putting that into real life contexts certainly leads to some clear strategic direction.  The creative geniuses at Burrows are also brilliant muses – when we start a new project our ideas can range from the sublime to the ridiculous and amongst all of those thoughts is generally a brilliant idea!  Bringing that to life is then a natural progression, whatever the media channel.

Your idea about the perfect working day:  Well, waking up at 9am would be a good start!  Followed by a brilliant brief to get sucked into (on the beach obviously) with a budget as big as the idea can be.  Lots of open minded, great thinkers from our team and a client who is really switched on to the potential that digital channels holds for them.

Your favorite interactive campaign and why:  It has to be the recent Volvo XC90 campaign we ran.  We’ve seen some good click-through rates, and importantly, high interaction rates and durations.  We realize that the online audience are often time scarce and as such don’t particularly want to click through to another website at that time.  Producing highly interactive ads allows us to immerse the user in the brand, give them the information they want and that will help them on to the next stage of the purchase process, and leave them with a positive impression.  It’s far more important to do that, than play a TV ad to someone who has probably already seen it.  Luckily Volvo is a great client who always encourages fantastic ideas and is really focused on exploiting digital channels. Again, simple interaction with a simple idea allows the power of the product to show through, rather than being lost in technology.

Changes that need to take place in the industry:  I think industry leaders need to realise that the idea is king, and not always the channel.  I hate to see a piece of digital work which wastes the technology, or lets the technology rule the idea.  Good digital strategy should not sit in isolation, but should be part of the communications planning from the start.  We are certainly starting to see that more, with FMCG brands in particular not leaving their online creative to the end of the process, but it needs to be a shift in the advertising industry as a whole.  Digital is really the front line, the place where consumers can actually interact with the brand and start a relationship with it.

Le’Nise Brothers, head of interactive, PHD Rocket has just posted a great article on iMedia UK.

Offering a rallying cry for sensibilities, she argues that the key is:

“…understanding of the role of digital in the wider comms mix. Digital isn’t a channel or medium – digital complements and enhances other part of the communications plan, which means that a silo approach where the digital agency / department receives briefs long after the comms planners / comms agency have crafted a solution will never work. Consumers don’t consume media in channels, so why should media be planned in channels?”

She is a woman after my own heart!

Lets face it, clicks DO NOT equal response and are unnatural behaviour towards advertising. They are neither a branding metric nor a derivative Direct Response metric. They only time it can be argued if the latter has clear call to action saying click here to buy, and even then we see appalling fall-off rates.

You simply cannot and will not measure “animated” advertising on TV, Outdoor, Print and dare-say Mobile via a click to prove effectiveness, and neither do I believe it is the most effective way of measuring online display advertising. It is floored and based on historic user experience from Search and we simply would not measure any other media channel by such an immediate trigger-happy response. Every other channel takes a message to the people, not the people to the message (on a landing page).

0.5% clicks is suggesting that 99.5% of people exposed have had no effect. We now know through studies that most of the clickers are not the target audience anyway (reducing actual CPC to your CPM) and have ZERO recollection of the brand – so what is the point of the click? Most people exposed to an ad campaign (wherever) make an emotional connection with a brand that leads them into exploration and inquiry later on – this could be measured within the ad itself, or via search for further info or possibly (but relatively small numbers) on a client direct site. I would argue we trust reviews on places like Amazon more than client site information these days in terms of consumers moving through a conversion funnel.

With this in mind we must measure effectiveness in terms of exposure in situation such as Dwell Time (i.e. the number of seconds user interacts with a creative of their own volition) and then any resulting effect seen along a path-to-conversion – doubtfully clicked and more likely searched. From data I have I can tell you that 10-20% of impressions are touched and played with for 1 minute on average (twice as long as TV spot) and up to 30% of people searching have been “exposed” to an online display ad first. These are lot more exciting and interesting numbers to demonstrate digital advertising effectiveness then the measly few who bothered to click…

The UFC campaign was created using “Eyeblaster Workshop for Adobe Flash”

An Interview with Aaron Buchanan, Technical Director at RED

What is the culture like at Red? At RED, we’re constantly challenging ourselves to get the best concept and the most powerful execution. We put a lot of effort into getting our client’s message across – we apply storytelling and cinematic elements; we’ll try to create a feeling or an emotion, and it has to give the end user an interactive experience. We always try to reinvent our creative to meet the unique needs of each new project – and when the idea is hot, it’s worth that extra effort.

You just finished a large campaign for UFC, where you used Eyeblaster Workshop for Adobe Flash^TM. UFC is a great client of ours – they have an exciting brand and are always looking for something fresh. On this campaign, we delivered that by using AfterEffects to create video that we streamed into Flash. We used Eyeblaster Workshop to assemble our ads and bringing these two powerful tools together within a flexible platform. The workshop allows us to streamline the process of producing high‐end rich media units. By being able to control more of the details ourselves, we’r able to produce higher quality work in less time. Once we got our hands on the workshop, we knew that we’ be able to save a few days from our schedule. That’s a big deal, because what we do with that extra time improves the quality of our work. The UFC video executions went very smoothly -we were able to focus on the creative challenges and spend less time with production. It was a big value for us to be able just pick up a tool and work with it right away.

Why do you use Eyeblaster for your advanced rich media campaigns? We work on large‐scale campaigns, with a lot of moving parts, and occasionally very short timelines. Getting these campaigns up and running is mission critical, and we need to deliver on time. The Eyeblaster platform is a great tool that allows us to simplify campaigns with many contributing agencies, channels, regions, etc. Since we deliver almost all of our work via the Flash platform, having a tool based within the authoring environment allows us do develop, test, and publish units very quickly. We do our own QA ‐ so having the ability to preview sync ads, for instance, is huge. It’ our task to make sure things work. With Eyeblaster, we have everything we need at our fingertips. Eyeblaster services are among the best out there, and I know they’ll be there for us when we need them. They’re always introducing new products and features.

How do you keep yourself up to date? Technically speaking, I read blogs, books, and I love a well‐documented API. Creatively, I’m a big fan of looking at what’s around me in the offline world. I love going out to the movies, and watching the titles to see how the big budget studios create new stuff.

Mark your calendar, book the dog sitter, set your Tivo because The 7th Annual Eyeblaster Awards are back November 5th!  It was the party to attend last year during Ad:Tech, so you don’t want to miss it this year.

The Eyeblaster Awards is among the oldest, most prestigious celebrations of excellence in digital advertising. We are talking one highly coveted piece of Lucite here. And you can help determine who gets one. Online voting begins October 6th. You can cast your vote on the best digital advertising in the world.
Here’s what you need to know:

• Online voting begins Monday Oct 6th and will continue through Oct 17.
• Voting results will be announced Wednesday November 5th at Arena in New York City
• Comedian Andrew Kennedy will MC this year’s Awards show.

Eyeblaster is rolling out the red (check that, orange) carpet – cast your vote and join us at the festivities.

Click here to vote!