Power Panel - The Money Will Stay Online
The thesis of this panel is that strategic media planning and buying is as challenging as it has ever been. I’m not really sure if they achieved this as much as they said that things are getting better. Moderator Jon Fine of BusinessWeek opened by putting on his traditional media idiot hat and asking if it is possible to build brand online. Unsurprisingly, the panel weighed in that the answer was yes, that would be an idiotic question.
The panel did foresee the continuation of the money moving online, even with the slowing economy. Scott Symonds of AKQA looks to the efficacy of the medium to create incremental effectiveness as the basis for an increase from the present 6%-7% of ad spend to 10%-12% over the next few years. He points to his recent experience of watching a 22 minute TV show on Hulu that was high quality on a full screen that went with no hiccups as an example of the future of digital media. Andrea Kerr-Redniss of Optimedia said that the line between TV and digital is blurring. She sees the industry as being at a tipping point, and that “with this economy people are looking for accountability and metrics.”
But where is the money going to go? Will it stay with the premium sites? Scott see the higher CPM going to the content that fits the advertising, not the biggest sites with the most reach. In fact, he says that “tier one inventory is artificially high.” Scott sees a truer marketplace in the networks and that because only 10% of spend online is brand focused, there is a larger growth area there. Greg Smith of Ogilvy chimed in that “there is what the market defines as CPM, and then there is what we’ll pay.” Mohan Reganathan of MediaVest added that looking at ROI analysis will dictate where the highest CPM will go.
Can you do digital only? Mohan said that you need to align tactics to your objectives to be able to do this and not to judge solely by clickthrough rates. Scott said that “online is not a tiny universe - there are still 200 million people online.” He sees aggregated audiences as the new reach through networks. Greg added that “you can’t always buy big audience with one property.”
When asked if the networks will move to the Web, Greg said that “we are still using models developed in the last century.” He thinks that “One future is that most of the money spent in a bid management world.” He sees algorithms, business rules, arbitrage, and performance marketing all being mixed together - even for branding. He sees the future as “non-stop, not as hand -crafted.
