Web Advertising - Making a Case for Branding

Last week we talked about the fairly disastrous results of the X10 ad campaign as it related to results (almost negligible sales). One thing about this campaign that is indisputable, however, is that it raised an enormous amount of visibility of the X10 camera, and in doing so, it helped to build X10’s awareness, and some would argue their brand. Lately, the notion of Web advertising as a brand-building tool has been growing in popularity. Let’s talk about the case for online advertising as a branding tool, who’s carrying the torch, and what the potential ramifications are for future advertisers.

What Is Branding? What Is Awareness?

We covered this question in our tip, “Just What is a Brand?”, and it’s not an easy thing to define, but there are some fundamental commonalities in all the definitions: branding is something that combines emotion with the recall and recognition of a product. If this is the case, Lord only knows what kind of brand image the X10 has with most folks out there — nothing too positive, as Web Ad.vantage tip reader, David Mitchell, voiced in his feedback to me.

On the other hand, awareness is simply the knowing of a product. You can have awareness of a product without necessarily feeling connected to it. Thus, branding experts would argue that most companies who claim to be branding themselves are doing no such thing of the sort — what they’re really doing is building name awareness and visibility.

Branding & The Web

Since advertising results on the Web are so measurable, online media buyers can be held to higher standards then many of their off-line peers. And as online response rates - particularly with respect to banners - have plummeted over time, there have been rumblings about online advertising being measured not by response rate, but instead by its impact on branding.

CBS MarketWatch took charge of the reigns on this issue, announcing last month that it was changing its ad tracking template to no longer automatically supply its advertisers with click-through data. The idea is to encourage advertisers to think of the Web as a branding medium and not a direct response one.

Results from several surveys have been published lately that seem to support this idea. One study, conducted for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) focused on the impact of new bigger ad sizes. It found that larger ads allow “deeper messaging and increased branding effectiveness.” Likewise are the conclusions from other organizations like CNET, MSN, and DoubleClick.

DoubleClick went even further and tested ad positions on a Web page: on the page, as pop-ups, and as interstitials (ads displayed as the visitor moves from one page to the next). They found that interstitials lifted branding metrics by as much as 194% (pop-ups received 52% lift, while large rectangle ads saw a 55% lift). Rich media ads, like those created in Flash and DHTML, showed branding promise too.

And then there’s YesSirNoSir the online brand created specifically to prove that branding works on the ‘Net. According to the published results of the case study, branding does in fact occur on the Web.

Ramifications

How will all this information affect what advertisers and media buyers do? Well, this all depends. For those advertisers to whom direct response is unimportant or less important, the fact that the Web has been shown to be a viable medium for branding is encouraging. For these advertisers, purchasing ad space on the Web now starts to make economic sense. Conversely, for advertisers who mainly care about generating a response, branding is not a priority, so this new information matters little to them.

What other lessons are there to be learned here? How about the fact that even if you’re not trying to do branding, bigger ads are still going to help you do so, so take advantage of this when planning media buys and ad creative? Or what about the fact that a brand can be built from Ground Zero online — can we leverage this information in the future?

I say, media buyers get ready. I firmly believe that a second, more tempered but more serious wave of online advertising is coming our way. This thing ain’t crashed and burned yet!

More information about this topic go to Click Z and read the aritcle titled “The Begining of the End of CTR?”

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