Well Greg Sterling is moderating today and he starts off with a VERY controversial statement. He believes that search is a better medium for branding than it is for direct response (conversion)! Our online media planner, Dan Redman, would love Mr. Sterling! James Lamberti from comScore starts off with, of course, some VERY cool numbers. He notes that most people are still using generic terms for search, as opposed to branded terms. Branded terms are still great and need to be addressed, but if you are missing the generic terms, you are missing out on a large segment. Another point that James makes is that people in the consumer packaged goods industry, and probably others, are looking for information and help. Most CPG marketers use the Internet as a big coupon drop as opposed to a medium where they can provide good information to consumers.

An overlying theme in this session seems to be the idea that search fuels brand awareness, not in a direct response manner, but in a longer term (branding) manner. It has long been known that people use search primarily for research and will typically purchase much further down the funnel. Well, this idea is being proven to be stronger than ever given all of the superb information that is being presented in this session, real hard data!

Connecting your brand to your customer’s passions is the best way to build a relationship with them. Appealing to the passions of your target audience really helps put your brand in the forefront. This really helps in creating the coveted brand advocates. Search is a huge partner throughout the entire relationship with your customer. From a paid search perspective, you need to match your “95 characters” to the consumer’s intent. Bob Tripathi, of Discover Card, notices that brand fixations occurred in the URL and title of their paid ads, not in the description, through eye tracking studies. They still spend a majority of their marketing budget in TV but have been doubling their budget in online and are currently at 16%. They definitely notice the impact TV ads have on both branded and non-branded terms, there are significantly more searches and conversions after running their TV ads.

Cam Balzer, of DoubleClick/Performics, notes that they are on a mission to build value with clients in the keywords that build the brand or purchase long before the actual desired end result. It is very difficult to track and to explain this subject to advertisers. Conversion is typically measured by only the last click, or Direct ROI. Adjusted ROI measures sales credit distributed across all paid search clicks in the stream. Investing in high-performance “assist” keywords will help boost the overall campaign. Eliminating under performing keywords and improving negative terms, are just some of the benefits of detailed clickstream analysis. Of course, you are going to need a very robust analytics to do this clickstream analysis, and from what I have seen, this investment in clickstream analysis is well worth it.
Cam shows us very convincing figures on the benefits of clickstream analysis from a fortune 500 client.

Overall, I do actually believe in the power of search in building the brand, creating awareness, and driving conversion. The only problems I see with the focus on branding over direct conversion comes from the standpoint of the small to medium sized businesses. The business that only has a few thousand dollars per month to spend online cannot afford to dedicate resources to detailed clickstream analysis, they need to drive conversions. Asking a small to medium sized business to spend more on branding is super difficult, even after showing them tremendous gains with conversion focused Internet marketing. On the flip side, the clients that we do work on, who focus on branding, do see great success. And their success is seen across all of the marketing initiatives on an aggregate level. It is these types of large clients that covet even just a minimal overall increase who realize the importance of brand building online.

With the steady decline of circulation numbers, newspaper readers continue to exhibit a high level of brand loyalty.

They have and always will read the same ‘paper’ that they have for the past 15 years. I can say that my parents certainly followed suit, as did their parents, growing up in the mid 60s. Sorry, mom, it’s for the sake of the blog.

Both generations read the LA Times and neither would ever be bothered by any competing or specialty papers. Although, a recent report by Scarborough Research (www.scarborough.com) shows trending of a different sort:

“(Newspaper Readers) have deep affinity with both their printed newspaper and their newspaper website: 83 percent agree with the statement, “I love both my printed newspaper and visiting my newspapers website.”

We can make several assumptions about the evolution of the newspaper reader based on the report’s findings.

1. Readers are increasingly more Internet savvy
2. The newspaper’s online affiliate and print are integrating effectively to drive traffic
3. From an advertising standpoint a great opportunity for message overlap can be achieved.

Atlas Research (www.atlassolutions.com) identifies message overlap to be valid for increasing consumer purchase intent; “Consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher.”

Typically, I would only use newspaper to serve two purposes; local event promotion and a retail push. Whenever I’ve taken a stab at generating bonifiable leads I haven’t been able to achieve Cost per Acquisition(CPA) goals. Maybe someone has had a different experience than me, but newspaper would be the last place I would ever have thought to launch a direct response campaign. With Scarborough’s report, new life can be breathed into a once drearily performing media touch point. Integrating the paper with its online affiliate is a great way to behaviorally target a Designated Market Area (DMA).