In fact, we often kid around and say “What would we do without TV?”  Interestingly, there are countless answers to this question (input your other favorite things to do here).

Today, we (consumers) love watching our favorite content on the web, and our mobile devices.   The convenience (despite the teeny tiny screens) cannot be ignored and is simply a huge part of our everyday lives nowadays.  It’s completely normal to now see a train full of commuters heads-down with their mobile device browsing, watching, reading, listening, laughing and steering (insert your favorite racing game here) to pass time on their way home to their next favorite screen (and to their friends & family of course).

As this trend/way-of-life swells (see the below eMarketer stat), so too will the advertising opportunities.  To allow our favorite content providers to scale their businesses and continue to provide us with mindless entertainment on-the-go, they need money!  Enter the dragon….or the advertisers !  We’ll continue to see more and more advertisements embedded within our favorite content.  Great for some, and annoying for others.  Nonetheless, it’s what will fuel the content we love so much.

As an advertiser, the online video landscape provides a unique, well-targeted, scalable, and measurable media format to deliver an ad/message with much greater consumer engagement (vs other online ad formats).    At Dynamic Logic, we’ve seen a surge of video ad units as part of our clients’ media strategy.   With that comes the want and need to understand how exposure and interaction with online video ad units (vs other online ad formats) impact brand measures (and other online behaviors thru our partnership with Compete).

If you’re planning to include online video ad units to your campaigns, feel free to connect with me anytime to discuss.  We have some interesting norms to share, and I’d be happy to learn more about your objectives and ultimately help develop a measurement strategy that will specifically address the objectives and challenges faced.

Scott Gendelman

Dynamic Logic

312.577.4066

scottg@dynamiclogic.com

]]> http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/04/30/scott-gendleman-writes-about-online-video/feed/ 2 http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/04/20/spring-is-in-the-air-alissa-coronnas-clients-are-warming-up-to-digital/ http://dynamiclogicblog.com/2010/04/20/spring-is-in-the-air-alissa-coronnas-clients-are-warming-up-to-digital/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:39:08 +0000 dynamiclogicbeaty http://dynamiclogicblog.com/?p=3409 There’s a buzz in the air lately here in the Chicago office.  As a freeze baby I’d like to attribute it to the abnormally warm spring temperatures and the start of baseball season, but more accurately our offices are buzzing with the influx of business this year.  Like all companies last year, we felt the effects of the economy’s downward spiral and as a result, the effects of our clients tightening their advertising budgets.

Now that budgets have opened up a bit in 2010, repeat clients are finding value in adding on solutions from our DLConnects™ suite and smaller advertisers and agencies are learning that they too can budget for online advertising effectiveness testing.  The economy last year forced many companies to reevaluate how they allocated their advertising dollars and many looked to the affordable nature of digital advertising.  This year, those companies are looking to find ways to test their digital efforts.

While business here in the United States continues to grow, I won’t be surprised if our offices around the world also start buzzing with demand.  Globally, the utilization of the online space is becoming more popular.  A quick search in Google Insights demonstrates the diverse global interest of digital advertising as South Africa, India, Malaysia and Singapore show the most searches for “online advertising”.  In January 2010, all four of these growing countries exhibited an increase (some quite drastic) in their interest in the online space.  DL offices abroad, get ready!

Alissa Coronna is an Account Manager at Dynamic Logic.  In her spare time she likes to travel, read, watch movies and seek out the latest restaurants in Chicago.

DL has recently launched the Connects™ suite of solutions which is meant to connect (yes, not so subtle, I know) our beloved attitudinal metrics with other metrics that are needed to fully comprehend the impact of a brand’s marketing effort. We have partnered with one of the best in behavioral measurement, Compete, to bridge the gap between the attitudinal and behavioral impact of a campaign. We have partnered with IRI to link campaign performance to offline sales data and most recently we have partnered with Cymfony to broaden our social media capabilities.

AdIndex and CrossMedia allow us to tell our clients how their planned media campaign performed, but what about their earned media? The ways in which people are talking about your campaign to peers and their social graph has just as large of an implication and is just as important to understand, if not more. As consumers shift their trust further and further away from advertising and closer and closer toward peer recommendations your brand’s social clout is central. Our partnership with Cymfony allows us to tell a more enriched story of the “well, what else happened and why?”

Some of the hesitation that I have seen from clients in regards to our partnership with Cymfony is the fact that we don’t use a control/exposed methodology. Social media measurement is an art of listening. We can’t, at this point, technically determine campaign exposure among the speakers because we can’t check the cookies of someone who posts a comment, no one can. As a matter of fact, I’m not even convinced that we should be allowed to do so. But what we can do with AdIndex Connects: Cymfony is integrate analysis of the millions of discussions occurring everyday on social media sites, blogs and message forums with our data to both quantify the effect of a digital campaign on brand perceptions as well as understand what consumers are saying about the campaign.  As Ann Green, SVP of Marketing Solutions at Millward Brown said, “Our partnership with Cymfony will allow us to leverage social media measurement to arrive at holistic insights that can truly drive our clients’ businesses forward.”

So to quote another very wise, yet fictional, individual by the name of Jerry Maguire, “Help me help you.” Be open to our approaches that don’t use control/exposed. I know it can be scary and while we all love cookies, there are other methods (don’t tell anyone I said that).  And finally, “you complete me” much like AdIndex Connects: Cymfony will complete your research story.

Jayne Hickey

Client Services Research Supervisor

Jayne Hickey Dynamic Logic Client Services Research Supervisor

We are pleased to announce the official launch of our ROI-driven solution — Conversion Index.  Conversion Index allows our clients to further understand the branding impact of their campaigns by translating Purchase Intent into estimated sales.

In today’s economy, as the need for ROI grows, our clients often want a metric closer to actual sales.  Through Conversion Index, an add-on to brand studies, clients can quantify impact of a digital advertising campaign by converting a Purchase Intent delta into an estimate of actual purchase or other KPI measures.

Conversion Index can be ideal for estimating sales impact of established or new products, line extensions, new formulations, etc. and can offer insight in these areas and more:

• How many people who say they are going to buy my product actually do?
• How many incremental purchasers were there? Incremental purchases?
• Where did I source my incremental purchases from? New customers? Existing customers?
• How can I convert a non-sales event, like intent to go see a doctor, into actual behavior?

To learn more about how Conversion Index can help you convert Purchase Intent into estimated sales, contact sales@dynamiclogic.com

Mention you saw it here firs,t and you wil win a prize ofl all the Chinese food menus that have been randomly stuck under our doors in the last seven years.

When I go to the office I live the vicarious life of a virtual tourist. Rather than stepping off a plane or a ship and being immersed in a different culture, I am exposed to a cacophony of out-of-context snapshots of other cultures every work day.

One of my first eye opening experiences in managing Global Operations was a study being run in China. I was keeping an eye on the recruitment levels as it went infield just out of curiosity. The number of survey respondents exploded instantly and grew at speeds that we would never see in the U.S. My first thought was to shut the survey down. Surely we were breaking some agreement with the publishers by commandeering all the available advertising real estate and then inviting every single visitor to take a survey. I naively envisioned 1.3 billion Chinese poised over their keyboards happily waiting to pounce on the next available survey.

Mercifully, one of my counterparts in Beijing explained what I was seeing. It’s not uncommon in China for even some the largest of portal sites to “lease out” their entire site to a single entity or a small group. For all practical purposes, you own all branding rights and advertising real estate on the site. There’s a catch of course. You can only “own” it for a few days at most. Imagine owning all the advertising real estate and data collection rights on a site like Yahoo.com or AOL.com…even for just a few hours.

Here are a few examples of some of those out-of-context, cultural snapshots. I’ve identified them by language since country borders are becoming less and less meaningful in the brave new internet landscape.

Chinese – Seeing this survey throws me every time I see it. This survey involves one of the largest American entertainment icons and is instantly recognizable by probably 99+% of Americans and here it’s mixed with a language that I imagine less than 1% of Americans can decipher. I find it pleasantly disorienting.

Russian – I was born into an era when the Soviet Union was planting nuclear missiles on Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was saying “We will bury you!” (apparently speaking figuratively to capitalism in general). Now I’m helping to execute a study to determine how well the marketing efforts of one the largest American chip manufacturers are going in Russia.

Arabic – Written Arabic is a visually beautiful language. Of course, I wouldn’t even recognize it as a language of any kind if someone didn’t tell me it was so. In addition to the translation issue, Arabic has the additional technical challenge of being written and read from right to left.

I’ve presented three glimpses of data collection across three very different regions and cultures. To paraphrase a saying; the more things change, the more they remain the same. I won’t bore you with numerical results but you can take comfort from the fact that out of this cultural chaos comes one global truth: If you expose people from any culture to enough advertising, it’s going to affect their attitudes and behaviors

I’ll leave it to the advertisers and the philosophers to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

- Scott Kresge

Research Operations Manager – Global

If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you.  No matter if you’re in New York, London, Paris  Munich or anywhere else  . We invite you to learn more by calling us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!

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The continually debated issue is around metrics, metrics, metrics. What are the correct metrics? Are some better than others? Some claim online measurement is a mess. Is it?

GRPs are important … with a caveat

Why are GRPs important? Well, two reasons. First, many large companies use GRPs as inputs to media allocation and other models. They depend on these models to understand the impact advertising in each media is having. Although there are other and, sometimes more cost-effective, methods for evaluating the independent and synergistic effects of advertising across different media, these GRP modeling approaches have been in place for many years and change is difficult.

Second, GRPs are constructed based on reach and frequency. Reach is important because it’s an input to another important formula: impacted reach = reach times ad effectiveness. More on impacted reach in a moment.

So, in the GRP debate, I’m on the GRP side with a caveat. I think reach is critical to determining overall impact or impacted reach, as I call it, of a campaign, but GRPs may over-simply the reach concept.

GRPs over-simplify the concept of reach, especially online.

If you have reach and frequency, you can calculate GRPs, but GRPs are an over-simplification. Here is why. In the online world, there is a big difference in impact between delivering 10 million impressions to 5 million people versus delivering 10 million impressions to 2 million people. They can both represent the same number of GRPs, but the impacted reach of the latter example is far less.

The table below steps through the math as to why this is so. This concept can be illustrated for any measure of perception or with sales data. In this example, I chose brand favorability as the perception metric and the data come from the Dynamic Logic MarketNorms database. I looked at three different exposure frequency groups: those that saw ads from a given campaign exactly once, those who saw 2-3 ads and those who saw 4 or more ads. The data are aggregated across 71 campaigns. Those who saw 2-3, had an average exposure of 2.3 and those who saw 4+, had an average exposure of 10.2.

From the above example, one can clearly see that the total effectiveness or impacted reach, in the three scenarios, is vastly different even though the number of impressions, which are the closest things we have to GRPs, are the same. I went into more detail on this in an i-Media connection article two years ago. Note how dramatically reach decreases at different frequency levels. The reach among the 4+ group is less than 1/10th of the reach in the single frequency group. The impact, on a percentage basis, is higher in the high exposure group (2.7% became favorable to the tested brand who otherwise would not have been, versus <2% in the <4 exposure groups) but the loss in reach cannot be made up and shows itself in the impacted reach calculation.

The problem of having similar GRPs associated with vastly different impact is less of a problem offline. In the offline world, once you choose, for example, a magazine, TV show or other offline channel, the range of possible frequencies is somewhat limited. Online, someone can see your ad dozens or even hundreds of times.

More on impacted reach and ad effectiveness

Impacted reach is the number of people impacted by a particular ad campaign. And, I believe that in 90% of cases, impact boils down to one of two things. For an ad campaign to be considered effective, in any media, it has to either change people’s perceptions about your brand or product or it has to drive incremental sales or both.

So, ad effectiveness = changes in perceptions + sales impact. Ad effectiveness is not about ad interaction, clicking, driving traffic, etc. These post-view behaviors can be very important diagnostically, but I don’t think they belong in the ad effectiveness equation. I’d put them in the category of very important diagnostic information. They’d be in the same category as finding out if someone read the newspaper circular or finding out if someone noticed an end-aisle display. They are important and can help you understand what went wrong when perceptions and/or sales are not impacted, but they aren’t endpoints in themselves. This is why Dynamic Logic launched AdIndex Connects with Compete so that we can now provide enhanced post-view behavioral data in addition to the attitudinal and sales impact metrics. It’s a very valuable layer of insights.

Is brand impact measurement broken?

Now to the issue of online brand impact measurement. Is it broken? In the eMarketer Brand Measurement article, there is a nice section citing Dynamic Logic MarketNorms data. It shows that, on average, online advertising lifts brand metrics. But, it also shows that there is great variability in results and that the bottom 20% of online ad campaigns actually have negative impact on perception.

Based on our further research, the biggest driver of success versus failure is the quality of the ads. So, we believe that in-market optimization of ads should not be based on click rates or interaction rates but, rather, on creative quality. Conducting a copy test before or early on in the campaign, can have a huge positive impact on results.

So, we do not believe online branding is broken and neither is measurement. Advertisers conduct thousands of research projects per year that include brand impact measurement as part of the accountability of the campaign. It is not too difficult to also compute impacted reach and ROI metrics such as impacted reach per dollar spent. Advertisers who focus on good creative tend to be more successful and we support folks like the Online Publishers Association who are pushing the envelope by launching new ad formats that more closely mirror magazine advertising.

Thanks, eMarketer for the continued great articles. Look forward to commenting more in the future.

Ken Mallon
SVP Custom Solutions
Dynamic Logic

Is Bigger Better When it Comes to Online Ad Size?  Jury Still Out, According to Dynamic Logic

Position and Shape May Play a More Important Role than Size  

New York, August 20, 2009 -Research released today by Dynamic Logic, the leaders in measuring digital advertising effectiveness, reveals ads that are integrated into the content of the page, such as half banners and rectangles, are the most effective in driving online ad awareness and purchase intent.

The research, based on 2,390 online display campaigns that took place over the past three years, is from Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms database, the largest in the industry.  It found that half banners (234 x 60) and rectangles (180 x 150) were more effective than ads that frame the page such as leadersboards and skyscrapers.

Read Full Press Release

Media Coverage: 

Top story in Ad Age today!  View Ad Age article:
Why Large Online Ad Formats Aren’t Industry’s Silver Bullet

Bigger Isn’t Necessarily Better When It Comes To Online Ad Formats

For every online display campaign, advertisers must decide what ad formats to use for best results. To help, DoubleClick teamed up with Dynamic Logic to study the impact of ad format selection on branding goals. In the joint report titled “The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads,” we compare the branding strengths of four common display advertising formats:

• Image – GIF or JPG ads
• Simple Flash – Ads with a short animation and single click-through link
• Rich Media with Video - Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that also contain video
• Rich Media without Video – Ads capable of responding to user interaction, such as mouseovers, keyboard inputs, or clicks without a click-through, that do not contain video

The report provides detailed information on how each of these formats impacts aided brand awareness, online ad awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. For example, study findings show that, on average:

• Rich Media formats are the most successful at driving purchase intent
• Rich Media without Video is unique among the formats in its ability to positively impact all five brand metrics
• Simple Flash is the least effective of the ad formats studied
• For brand favorability, aided brand awareness and purchase intent metrics, Rich Media with Video provides a statistically significant improvement over Simple Flash at a 90% confidence level

The report concludes with a cheat sheet to help guide your ad format decisions and suggests best practices for achieving branding goals. We hope you enjoy this and it helps you. Please feel free to contact us directly with any questions at 212-844-3700 and tell the person answering the phone that you read about it on our Blog!

There are already a few  articles in which the research has been covered -    Video In Rich Media Ads More Likely To Lead Customers To Purchase by MediaPost and  WebProNews Google Analyzes Rich Media Ad Effectiveness .

If you have any questions related to this presentation or our capabilities please feel free to call us at 212-844-3728 and tell them you read about it in the Dynamic Logic Blog!