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Tuesday, August 21, 2007

How Ads Affect Our Memory

Continued from page 1

By Andrew Schrock

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Many advertisers offer companies and individuals both impression- and performance-based measurements. Google's Adsense allows revenue to be collected in number of impressions or per click. Popular video-sharing website Revver relies mainly on click throughs, but it recently introduced impression-based advertising.

Heather Luttrell is president of online marketer IndieClick, based in Los Angeles, which charges according to impressions. The company's goal is to connect retailers with viewers who are highly relevant to the advertiser, ensuring an attentive audience.

"Clicks are not the most important thing," Luttrell says. How people find the site is not as important as tracking what they do once they go to the site. IndieClick found that click throughs accounted for only a fraction of the increased site activity created by an ad campaign. On a consistent basis, Luttrell says, site statistics "showed seven times more traffic at that destination site than we would have shown through click through alone."

Yoo recommends focusing on targeting neither explicit nor implicit memory but, rather, both. A larger campaign might not be based exclusively on click-through behavior, he says, and many of the implicit effects of online advertising are not yet fully understood.

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Comments

  • Finally, someone applies logic to Internet analytics
    Yellowwoods on 08/25/2007 at 2:33 PM
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    Over the last 35 years, I've owned ad agencies and magazines (both print and online). The argument that an advertising campaign's effectiveness in an online magazine can mainly be measured by click-throughs has always struck me as specious logic. Bravo to you, Professor Chan Yun Yoo! You have put research and hard data behind what many of us knew to be true all along: the power of the medium cannot be measured only by the direct responses it generates for a client. As David Ogilvy once said: "Every communications from a client to a potential customer is an investment in the BRAND." At any one time, the readers of a magazine will be situated somewhere along the continuum of The Hierarchy of Effects. For certain some of them will be ready to click the online ad and buy the client's product or service. Many more, however, will be at another stage in the learning/buying cycle. For them to merely view the ad and take in whatever impression they are able to absorb in that moment—possibly to move closer towards a buying decision--is what the entire marketing business is all about. Those awareness-building impressions are ultimately as critical and valuable to the client as any others. Without an increasingly large base of awareness and predisposition towards a client’s brand—well, adios. Relying on the click-through model as the primary measure of a campaign's impact shows little understanding of how buying decisions are truly made and it diminishes the online magazine's editorial environment as a powerful enhancer to the advertiser's message and product/service offerings.
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  • Good old discussion
    alexhar on 09/05/2007 at 1:34 AM
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    This merely reiterates the age old discussion between brand and direct marketing advertising. Such reiteration is timely. The internet was initially viewed as an e-commerce, sales channel...hence DM type metrics is of key importance.

    Increasingly we are, especially with the growth of the socialized media beginning to recognise the brand impact that web marketing can create.

    The traditional set of metrics for branding...awareness, recognition, recall becomes more relevant. Traditionally these measures are obtained through periodic marketing research in which an additional process and cost is involved.   The challenge for web marketers is to develop methods of measuring these on the flow. Like marketing research of any kind, this will require some form of response from the target audience though not necessarily in direct response to a particular comuunication.

    A greater challenge lies in trying to integrate  the two sets of measures, Branding and Direct Marketing.  At Systems Strategists, we have been experimenting with dynamic simulation models for usch purposes and would like to share our thoughts on this with other interested parties. Do contact through our website at http://one1.com.sg      
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  • Definitions
    johnrosen2 on 10/11/2007 at 10:24 PM
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    I hate to sound pedantic, but, as a former marketing director for Webster's New World Dictionary, I feel obligated to point out that the previous commenter simply illustrated why the two disciplines are referred to as "online ADVERTISING" and "Direct MARKETING."
    Rate this comment: 12345
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