IAB BLOG: Ad measurement pioneer

Nicki Lynas, head of research, discusses Fatboy Slim's pioneering approach to best practice in online ad measurement.

Friday, 6 March 2009

I read on Brand Republic that Fatboy Slim is using online advertising – rich media banners – as part of the launch for his new band, the Brighton Port Authority. The interesting thing about this is that he is only going to pay his agency on the number of times people rollover the ad – so no click through rates, no page views, no singles downloaded on iTunes metrics for Fatboy, just a standard web 2.0 functionality of banner rollovers.

What I find intriguing about this is that the brand thought about what was relevant to them – trialling the music video – and then set up a payment metric for their agency based on this and this alone. No ROI evaluation on site traffic or Google searches or iTunes sales. No doubt they will be following these other metrics, but these rely on factors that are - creative appeal apart – out of the control of the humble banner ad. Sales will depend on air play, awareness and likeability of the music. Click through metrics will depend on time of day, where users are seeing the ad and in a large part on the consumer’s willingness to click on banner ads. The ad agency are being measured on the success of the banner ad and this alone. This is so appealing as it is correctly judging the role that the banner ad campaign is playing in the marketing mix and links the agency reward to achieving this objective.

In my view not all brands use the full range of metrics available to evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns. Measuring click through rates is the default setting – even if the campaign or the creative is not directly targeted at achieving click throughs. Web 2.0 allows measurement of so much more. There are automotive campaigns where consumers can book test drives and request brochures into the rich media ad itself rather than clicking through to a website. Intext ad formats allow consumers to roll over a text link and view an ad without having to launch a new page. Some ads have games built in with no need to go through to a website. All of these are great examples of how web technology can be used to go beyond the banner / click model that has come to dominate online display and these interactions carry a value that may be more useful to advertisers than click throughs.

Looking at click through rates is not a bad thing – the transparency and reporting capabilities of online will strengthen in this time of budget cutting and scrutiny. But focusing on click through rates as the be all and end all of display advertising is ignoring the value and the possibilities of the medium.

A campaign to drive traffic should focus on click throughs. A campaign that is about raising awareness and working with other media should be measured on media neutral brand awareness metrics. A campaign to drive awareness of a product – such as in the fatboy slim case above – should focus on interaction and exposure. We know that media and creative campaigns need to be set up against very clear objectives which need to be measured. Thinking about the campaign objectives from a metrics point of view should happen first. Then the agencies working with brands can be briefed to develop work that will achieve the aims using all of the online advertising tools available. This may seem obvious but it is not something that is always the case in online.

From the IAB perspective this is exactly why we think the development of UKOM is so important. A common planning tool is a necessity to encourage brands to understand how important measurement is in campaign planning and to demystify online audience measurement. This is at the core of UKOM's objectives . Creating a common media planning tool for online will be a giant step closer to an achievable utopia of driving more value in and understanding of how online display advertising can work over and above click through rates.

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