Photo: charlesstarrett http://www.flickr.com/photos/starrett

Photo: charlesstarrett http://www.flickr.com/photos/starrett

This post is part of a series see post 1, 2.

Let’s face reality. Online publishers bellyache about getting more dollars from traditional brand advertisers but they don’t really think about or work toward solutions to meet their needs. Publishers have been chasing the easy dollars and become totally rich doing so. When there’s so much money in the easy stuff why should we expect them to work harder, it’s a reality we have to face. Publishers despite wanting all media dollars, have ignored brand marketing in favor of direct marketing. They’re using Henry Ford’s famous pitch, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”

Let’s spend some time on the reality of the solutions that are available in the market. A lot of what’s out there is direct marketing oriented. I’m fortunate that in my day job I get to speak to all kinds of Internet companies that are pushing the envelope on digital marketing. There’s some really cool technology out there to pull every dollar from the available media. But disappointment is inevitable; toward the end of the pitch, I ask my question: “This is great, but what can you offer brand marketers like P&G”. Usually the response is the sound of crickets, either that or some babble about half hearted tweaks that really don’t provide a solution. Over the course of these conversations I can’t help but think online media companies don’t think about brand marketers.

Why would that be the case? Well in retrospect it makes total sense. Online media companies are really just data manipulating machines. They’re engines of creation, they take data, the atomic unit of the internet, and smith it into marketing gold. The problem is it’s damn near impossible to find data online that brand marketers could see as directly relevant to their business. Take an industry that online advertising excels in – financial services. It’s easy to see how at the lowest levels there’s plenty of data to mine. The most basic application would be to run 30 ads for a new credit card and monitoring the card applications to weed yourself down to only those creatives that are generating the highest conversion rates – these days this is elementary work. Try to do the same thing for shampoo? Yeah – not possible.

So what does this mean? Well for one thing, there’s no easy product a publisher can put in front of a brand marketer that is salient. Yes I can hear people crying foul – arguing that TV doesn’t provide anywhere near to the interaction or data that online does, but face it; the promise of the internet display advertising is in the manipulation of the data that drives better results. Without the data to make online sing (and I mean sing like it does for financial services) and with bad creative format to choose from, I can see why as a brand marketer I’d take TV any day of the week.

I have to admit I don’t see an easy solution to this challenge. And challenge it is. There’s a reason why the companies I speak to have lame solutions for brand marketers. Figuring out where to find great brand marketing data online is not an exercise in finding the data but one in creating data. Until someone finds a way to create more brand marketing data online, or we see brand purchases migrating online (not in my lifetime) then we’re at a standstill.

What do you think?

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