A relatively standard way of working out the value of a brand building campaign in old media is to advertise say Bold washing up powder in all regions but the Northwest and define that region as a control group for research. The advertiser can then watch the uplift in purchases of Bold in the regions with the advertising vs. the trend they would have seen based on the control. This is obviously tricky because it is hard to pick out local PR effects and so on from the overall trends and does the Northwest really have the same trending as the rest of the country in general but in broad strokes it works.
Something that shocks me is that I have not heard of large brand advertises using this trick online and I have been browsing blogs and searching for evidence of this happening. Geotargetting through Ads on Google/Yahoo/the big banner networks to a city level is totally doable. Why not just for a test spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a banner advertising campaign in say for example York in the UK or Boston in the US on a sizeable network like adsense or valueclick. Running this campaign for a similar period to an offline campaign and looking for uplift.
Maybe I am being foolish and this is already happening, I just don't know about it or maybe brand advertisers are convinced of the value of online already (as a site owner I don't believe this... if they did I wouldn't have smiley ads continually appearing through Valueclick, Casalemedia and Burst on my site) but I love to do things that I can measure and as such this idea really excites me esp. since it could convince more advertisers to spend money online.
Maybe I am being foolish and this is already happening, I just don't know about it or maybe brand advertisers are convinced of the value of online already (as a site owner I don't believe this... if they did I wouldn't have smiley ads continually appearing through Valueclick, Casalemedia and Burst on my site) but I love to do things that I can measure and as such this idea really excites me esp. since it could convince more advertisers to spend money online.
Posted by: viagra online | March 05, 2010 at 01:21 PM