Scaling Digital’s Peaks
By Martin Ross
Despite all the talk about its transformative potential and the growing share of eyeballs it commands, digital advertising remains a disproportionately small piece of most advertisers’ ad spend. What’s keeping advertisers from conducting larger portions of their campaigns online, and why aren’t agencies moving the process forward with greater velocity?
The 800 pound gorilla roaming this adolescent channel is scalability. Many agencies only tenuously push for greater adoption of digital because they don’t feel fully prepared to deliver on its promise. Along with its unprecedented potential – immediate and real-time performance metrics, on-the-fly optimization capabilities and complex interaction functionality – comes the need to ramp up with new personnel, expertise and infrastructure.
A New Kind of Innovation
Thus far, innovation in digital advertising has been largely devoted to creating new forms of interaction between advertiser and user. But these sales tools have revealed the need for another set of tools, one that will streamline the processes that make digital advertising possible. Now that we know the capabilities of the medium, we need to take advantage of those capabilities in a way that is simple, efficient, streamlined and cost effective.
For the sake of simplicity, I’ve divided the issue of scalability into three main areas: production, management, analysis.
Digital Campaign Management
Thus far, innovation in digital advertising has been largely focused on discovering and creating new opportunities for interactivity between advertiser and user. But relatively few resources have been spent on innovations that streamline the creation, placement, management and tracking of digital ads. Consequently, agencies view interactive advertising as resource-heavy, as requiring disproportionate levels of man-hours spent poring over tags and monitoring delivery and performance.
What is needed is a comprehensive set of tools that streamline the process of overseeing campaigns: an intuitive interface with a clear visual representation of campaign performance, a means of easily placing and swapping creative elements for on-the-fly campaign optimization. When media agencies can focus on their core strength – media planning and effective campaign management – then they will once again operate at the height of their potential.
Performance Analysis
Interactive advertising introduces an unprecedented amount of data. Today’s analytics can tell advertisers where their audience is, what the audience responds to, and precisely which creative aspects are successful. Each campaign creates a mountain of data to compile, parse and interpret. Agency professionals are media strategists, market experts and communication specialists. They’re not statisticians. These professionals need a set of tools that will deliver the data in real-time, packaged in a logical, easy to read fashion.
Digital Production
As online advertising becomes more mainstream, a new framework will arise. I see the trend in digital approximating the current paradigm for video – where creative and production are performed by separate agencies, working closely together. A digital production house, consisting of specialists, would be able to produce and optimize creative much more efficiently than a creative agency with one or two programmers or Flash gurus.With a newfound confidence that digital advertising can be produced quickly and easily, by experts, agencies wouldn’t shy away from conducting much more extensive (and effective) campaigns online.
Scalability is a matter of easily adjusting our current resources to a new framework. We know that the advertising industry has no shortage of creative or strategic resources – but committing those resources to the new digital milieu has come slowly. The way to open the floodgates is to hand our accomplished creatives and our keen strategists a new set of tools – tools that will bring the entire interactive medium into focus. That focus, in turn, will drive the gorilla from the room.
The above article is contributed by our trainer, Martin Ross, who has over 18 years of marketing and consulting experience in various industries including broadcasting, advertising, publishing, IT and management consulting. With more advertising dollars being committed to online advertising, Martin’s current role is to manage key accounts and co-ordinate regional campaigns. He preaches the virtues of rich media and how advertisers can get more bang for their buck with digital marketing.
Martin will be conducting the following public learning course at the Marketing Institute:
• Digital Marketing Bootcamp – 14 Aug 2008
• Developing Digital Media Strategies – 25 & 26 Sep 2008
For more information on the course, please contact Angelina or Su at 6327 7586 or 6327 7588, or email seminars@mis.org.sg
The views expressed in the above article do not necessarily represent those of the Marketing Institute of Singapore. No responsibility is accepted by the Institute or its staff for the accuracy of any statement, opinion or advice contained in the article. All articles on our website are copyright and no part may be reproduced without prior written permission of the Marketing Institute of Singapore.
