Online Ads Do Work, Research Shows

Jul 18 2001

Online advertising server DoubleClick, Microsoft's MSN online unit and the Interactive Advertising Bureau presented research Wednesday that demonstrates the efficacy of interactive advertising as a branding tool.

Presented in New York, the three separate studies measured improvements given to brands through the use of both traditional banner ads and the new larger ad units, for which the IAB issued guidelines for in February. Not surprisingly, the bigger the ad, the better the recall, especially when the larger ads were combine with flash and dynamic coding to allow animation and other eye candy.

More importantly, the studies showed increases in critical measures such as brand awareness.

For example, an IAB study for Coke showed a lift of 56 percent in message association; a lift of 7 percent in brand favorability; and a lift of 5 percent in purchase intent from advertising with the new IAB "large rectangle" format.

While the new ad formats were pushed out by the IAB with great hype, DoubleClick global media President Barry Salzman said that most advertisers were adopting a wait-and-see attitude, as many have with the entire medium. The general perception among mainstream marketers is that Internet advertising works well as a direct marketing vehicle, but has little impact when used for brand advertising. Not coincidentally, many of the biggest campaigns in traditional media are branding exercises.

"It's been piecemeal in terms of client interest and we felt strongly that we needed some research if we were going to tell big sites that needed to redesign their editorial content," Salzman said. "What we've found is that not only can online advertising lift brand awareness measures, where it really delivers value is enhancing, changing or redefining brand attributes. That's really important if we want to attract spending from big brands like Coke, where awareness is not a problem and they have no interest in selling their product on the Web."

DoubleClick will now launch a road show for clients in which it will show off its research and sell a new expanded package of outsized ad inventory.

As for the larger sites, many of which were using large ads long before the IAB guidelines?

"Online absolutely works for branding," insisted MSN national sales director Jed Savage.

Now all they have to do is convince the advertisers.