Size and Complexity of Interactive Media Investments Continues to GrowJanuary 20, 2011
Independent Auditor Urges Advertisers To Elevate Performance Oversight
Whether you work in the business or are an ordinary consumer, you cannot miss the onslaught of news regarding the growing importance of interactive media and its role in marketing and advertising. Portals, search engines, mobile, ad networks, social media and others are all part of a growing ecosystem that has brought opportunity as well as complexity to the business of marketing. Media planning and buying are no exception.
A recent study, “Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010,” supported by the Association of National Advertisers, Interactive Advertising Bureau, the American Association of Advertising Agencies and management consulting firm Booz & Company acknowledged the growing challenges to marketers and their media agencies. Findings included the following key trends:
Key Lessons from “HD Marketing 2010: Sharpening The Conversation
The Team and Tools You Need to Market in an Increasingly ‘Digitally Savvy World’” (October, 2010)
The stakes are certainly high as shown in these recent headlines:
- “Web Ad Dollars Finally Overtake Newspapers” (Peter Kafka, All Things Digital, December 20, 2010 per November eMarketer data)
- “Mobile Payments Jump 300 Percent During Holidays, PayPal Says” (Tricia Duryee, All Things Digital, December 17, 2010)
- “To Date, U.S. Online Holiday Spending Up 12 Percent To $16.8 Billion” (Leena Rao, Techcrunch, December 5, 2010)
- “Black Friday Boasts $648 Million in U.S. Online Holiday Spending, Up 9 Percent vs. Year Ago” (comScore Press Release, November 28, 2010)
- “Zenith, Group M predict robust online ad spending growth” (Mercedes Cardona, Direct Marketing News, December 6, 2010)
… The last of these cited Group M forecasts of online adspend as high as $82 billion in 2011, with “10.5% growth in US online ad spending in 2011 to $28.5 billion, as well as double-digit growth rates through 2014, when spending totals will hit $40.5 billion”
Savvy marketers are asking whether their organizations and the agencies that support them are adapting to the new realities of the marketplace fast enough, whether they are adequately equipped with the research, tools and know-how required to optimize their interactive marketing and media investments. Independent media auditor, Media Management, Inc., has helped many of the leading advertisers evaluate the performance of their interactive media efforts with a clear focus on the effective application of Best Practices in planning, buying, stewardship/optimization and financial management. These efforts have helped MMI clients to attain improved transparency, elevated their care, custody and control of interactive media investments and inplaced new and improved processes to drive performance improvement, ultimately increasing marketers’ interactive Return On Investment.
MMI Service Offerings
- Interactive Media Process Assessments … Reviews your interactive media effort across the entire investment cycle from planning to buying, optimization and reporting, use of research, performance analytics and systems to drive decision-making and financial management. Includes in-depth Documents Review to identify key improvement opportunities in controls, tracking/reporting and the analysis around campaign optimization.
- Interactive Circle Audit® … Independently tracks plan-buy-actual performance across the campaign to provide total transparency into ongoing media performance, identify opportunities to improve ROI, simplify reporting and highlight performance issues for follow-up by the media agency.
- Click Audit … Search Engine Marketing practitioners widely acknowledge that invalid click activity, including outright fraud, has a negative impact on paid search return on investment. Click audits assess potential fraud in advertisers’ click activity, from bots to internal activity from the engines and international activity as well as other sources. The audit provides recommendations to mitigate the problem as well as identifies low quality (e.g., non-converting) activity that may further reduce Return On Investment.
- Interactive Advertising (Impressions) Audit … Display, rich media, mobile advertising typically are charged on a pay per impression basis with a variety of sources of potential fraud – publishers, international and made for advertising sites as well as others. The audit identifies both fraudulent and low quality impressions activity to aid in elevating the productivity of the digital advertising effort.
- eMail Assurance Audit … Validates email delivery reporting – sends, opens, clicks, etc. as well as handling of mailing lists (de-duping, invalid addresses) to assure the accuracy of reporting and efficiency of the overall eMail marketing effort.
Key Findings
MMI has uncovered improvement opportunities across a wide range of interactive media. Findings have included:
Process Gaps
- Undisclosed multi-agency paradigms resulted in laddering of fees to over 170% of the original fee to the agency of record with no increase in services provided.
- Key elements and analyses to be added to the interactive media plan.
- High-level performance reports not sourced to media vendors. Others focused on site by site “highlights” emphasizing media metrics with no perspective on KPI performance or costs, inhibiting transparency into relative performance.
- Limited access to analytics inhibit the ability of the planning and buying team to drive toward effective/efficient KPI achievement. At the other extreme, analytics overload clearly indicates the imperative to reassess the measurement plan to focus on KEY performance indicators aligned with campaign objectives.
- Errors in analysis negatively impacting optimization recommendations.
- Opportunities to enhance research and analysis, site analytics, tracking performance, etc.
- Conclusions unsupported by research or analytics data.
- Payment for over-delivery and subsequent pullback of buys to avoid overspending which reduces overall return on investment.
- Paid Search Insertion Orders issued well in excess of client approvals to simplify savings reinvestment but putting the client at risk of overspend.
- eMail activity not tracked or ineffectively tracked in site analytics, inhibiting the assessment of campaign effectiveness.
- Text-based eMail links missing key identifiers to support effective tracking in site analytics systems.
- Ineffective or incomplete tracking of eMail opens, clicks, bounces, etc.
- eMails missing linkage to downstream conversion tracking, inhibiting attribution and overall campaign optimization.
- Outsourced ad operations eliminating agency quality assurance with no apparent benefit to clients.
- Control documents lacking sufficient detail.
Fraudulent or Low Value Activity Depleting Budgets and Driving Down Return On Investment
- Inaccurate visitor counting due to ineffective tracking code in flash/rich media or improper site analytics configuration.
- Undercounting where adserver requests are redirected to a secondary adserver.
- Competitive click fraud.
- International activity drawing down domestic search budgets and proven to be lower value based on the lack of conversion. International activity also distorted optimization and future investment decisions.
- Advertiser internal addresses comprising a significant portion of the mailing list for selected campaigns.
- Failed or ineffective alert systems and their negative impact on analytics.
- Security compromises, failed or ineffective alert systems which compromise analytics.
- Multiple eMail sources employed without consideration of duplication across supplier mailing lists.
- Ineffective geo-targeting.
For more information about how MMI can help you to evaluate and elevate the performance of your interactive media effort, please contact:
Thomas Bridge
Founder/CEO
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Steve Smith
Director, Business Development
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