Why online branding is still an infant

A lot of us have wondered time and time again how come brand advertising is a premium product on TV and (to some extend) in print but not online. Especially considering the fact that online you can measure everything, while on other media platforms you as an advertiser have to rely on panels, statistics, algorithms and such.

Well, now John Batelle, the founder and CEO of Federated Media and the author of the brillant book on Google entitled “The Search” offers his part of an explanation. And its a good one, I think.

… why are we judging our online marketing by the standards of direct response? Is it, perhaps, because we can? Or, perhaps, is it because we don’t know how to measure that magic that occurs between a consumer’s ears when they first see the image of a beautiful woman standing in a crumbling doorway?

And he goes on:

To reach, say, millions of business leaders, advertisers could buy six business magazines or six cable shows and run the same creative. They could then see results - lift in brand awareness, perception, and sales. But online, it was hard to find six similar places to run the same creative, and even if they could, the results were not there. Those tiny IAB units were simply not doing what a two-page spread or 30-second spot could do. To get results, they needed massive scale - and they would not pay massive CPMs to get there.

This economic reality drove CPMs down, and the measurability of IAB units added another wrinkle - now marketers could see results directly, and compare them to their spend in direct response type campaigns. It was a race to the lowest common denominator. Portals, with massive traffic, began selling tonnage instead of brand engagement, and the cycle reinforced itself.

To John Batelle the answer to the question of how do publishers get a better value proposition into online marketing is obvious: Conversational marketing. No surprises there given John’s interests in Federated Media. But I do think there’s a point in this - and a point that leads to something bigger.

Media companies - publishers - have excelled in only one thing when it comes to online advertising ever since the commercial web was born: Driving their ad inventory towards commodity status. New formats and new types of measurement have been sold to advertisers in ways that resembled the direct response story. And the revenue generated from that ’success’ was of course influenced by it.

No one really cared to sit down and tell the branding story and stick to it. Noone had the ressource to actually sit down and be concistent about the online branding story and figure out what that “piece of magic between the ears” referred to in an online branding context. And the results suffered.

If conversational marketing is going to be the engine that hauls the online publishing industry out of this mess, then fine by me. It’s just crucial that it gets done, if online publishing is ever going to be a profitable business area in its own right.

Vad NU! is a consultancy company owned by Mads Kristensen and specialized in helping clients take advantage of the business opportunities created by new media. Click to learn how I can help you and your company.