Last week I attended a day of discussion on online measurement at OMMA Metrics & Measurement conference in New York City. The opening keynote came from John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen Online. His impressive resume includes CMO at AOL, VP of Marketing at AT&T/Cingular and Brand Management at P&G. Coming from a history of building well known brand names, his view of online advertising was partial towards brand marketers. The primary message of his keynote addressed how brand marketers should align their metrics with attitudinal and purchase data to understand the true impact of their ad dollars.

Burbank said brand marketers should measure the impact of their campaign on brand attitudes, brand perceptions and offline sales. However, he discouraged brand marketers from using behavioral metrics like viewthrough and search queries to assess the success of their brand campaign. While it’s true that direct response campaigns will be better measured using behavioral metrics, brand marketers should not ignore behavioral indicators.

Continue reading “Even Brand Marketers Need to Take Behavioral Data into Account” »

Media planners dwell in a quandary: the efficiencies presented by ad networks and the effectiveness promised by behavioral targeting make perfect sense, but there are hundreds of players in this space and differentiating between them can be difficult.  How good is their inventory?  How good is their targeting?  How can you know – in advance or even after a campaign – whether you’ve made the best choice?

Continue reading “Getting good behavior from your ad network” »

With the unemployment rate at 10%, the stock market 30% below its peak from the fall of 2007 and companies continuing to announce layoffs, it can be hard to remain optimistic these days.  However, Oscar Mayer is trying to change that by bringing some cheer with its Good Mood Mission campaign, which is a charity program aimed at feeding the hungry.  Consumers are encouraged to go to their Good Mood Mission site to submit a “good mood” comment that starts with “it doesn’t get better than”.  For each good mood submitted, the company will donate a pound of food to Feeding America, a hunger relief charity organization.  I submitted a “good mood” myself and I did end up in a better mood just by thinking about the things that put me in a good mood.

Continue reading “Oscar Mayer Brings Good Mood” »

On 1/26, Compete’s CMO,  Stephen DiMarco, posted a blog on Media Post’s Online Metrics Insider about how  “the precision of online media is both a blessing and a curse for marketers. Left unchecked for way too long, online advertising has been overrun by tactics and success measures that are singularly suited for direct marketers and are not so effective for brand builders.”

Read DiMarco’s full post.

Because many of our Ad Impact clients ask “How does Compete see ads?” or “What is it you see?” we decided to answer those questions in this forum with a peek “under the hood.”  The “hood” in this case isn’t the one covering our servers or software or algorithms, but the one that covers the big, brilliant Internet itself.

If you’re not 100% confident in your understanding of how Web pages “work,” any site will provide a quick lesson and illustrate what Compete “sees.”  Let’s say you visit LinkedIn to check up on a recent business contact.  From your perspective, you might type “linkedin.com” into the browser’s address bar, and the page appears in a few seconds.  Then you sign in and click ‘submit.’  What you see next would look (something) like this:

Continue reading “A look under the hood of Ad Impact” »

As we approach the New Year, we are also approaching an important date in the world of football, Super Bowl XLIV.  Next year’s Super Bowl is just about six weeks away and NFL players are still battling their way to see which 2 teams will make it to Miami on February 7, 2010.  But already advertisers have made their decisions about advertising in the big game.  Last week, Pepsi made the surprising announcement that they will not be running any television commercials during next year’s Super Bowl, ending a 23-year long tradition of Pepsi ads during the big game.  Instead, Pepsi has decided to shift their advertising dollars online.

Continue reading “Pepsi Smartly Shifting Ad Dollars Online” »