Internet Advertising: Don't Get Biased by the Hype
The Internet, and in particularly social networking, represents a new paradigm in many regards: for socialization, for marketing, for market research, for commerce, and much more. It is now about random content, about markets self-organizing, about smarter consumers, about a change in the balance of influence, etc, etc, etc. I think we all understand this. The challenge is how to proceed as a marketing organization selling FMCG brands, services, or non-profit communications?
There is much hype about the death of traditional media, and that digital on-line marketing is the most important touchpoint. Although social networking offers new opportunities, any decisions to invest money into advertising on the Internet and through social networks should be done based on reason, and not hype. In my mind, the question about Internet marketing is not about "does it work?" because I am sure it does to some degree. Instead marketers should be asking: "Is this the best use of my next dollar versus alternate uses to achieve my marketing objectives?" The latter question is about cost efficiencies, efficacy, and the return on the investment. And it assumes the research is not biased in favor of one medium over all others.
-- "Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it" -- (Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States).
The recently announced partnership between Facebook and Nielsen requires us all to critically assess what is being offered when discussing Internet-related marketing. Here is the concept (from the Nielsen website): "The first product of the collaboration, Nielsen BrandLift, is designed to provide marketers with effectiveness measurement for Facebook advertising... BrandLift uses opt-in polls on Facebook's homepage to measure consumer attitudes and purchase intent from display advertising that has appeared on the site."
Facebook clearly wants proof that advertising on their website is impactful. Nielsen offers a recognized third-party endorsement. Perhaps Facebook also negotiated some revenue sharing with Nielsen(?). This is an important possibility since social network sites are challenged to produce revenue, and they can do so by commercializing the access to their visitors.
The BrandLift design has some significant flaws. Participation in the survey is based on self-selection 'opt in' recruitment so its representativity must be questioned. Second, the sample is skewed to 100% Facebook visitors so the results do not give a representative picture of the possible alternate uses of the advertising dollars (in other media such as TV, Print, and so on). Lastly, the BrandLift questions are quite simplistic, likely because Facebook is trying to stay away from breaching privacy laws by allowing the linking of other data to the BrandLift survey (at this point anyway!).
All this to say, the Internet represents a significant opportunity for marketing, but one has to be critical of the hype, and avoid claims from biased approaches. We need to be media-neutral when assessing the best alternate use of each marketing dollar.
John Hallward is a member of the Ipsos ASI team, our advertising research specialty, with global responsibility for product development/product management. He is a published author, "Gimme!" (2007,) and the 2008 winner of the ARF's "Great Minds Award" for Innovation (New York). He often writes and presents insights on how advertising works, based on Ipsos ASI's extensive research and databanks of pre-tested ads and tracked campaigns.
