Buyer’s guide to Online Advertising

2007 is likely to be another year of rapid development in the area of digital advertising. It’s clear that in these heady days of digital media adoption by consumers, that agencies and advertisers need to catch up and keep up – and that’s a mighty challenge.

Digital media isn’t just the web anymore and it definitely isn’t just search. A multi channel digital world needs to be increasingly linked together with each other and the real world too - consumers don’t break it into channels like we do. Trying to make sense of this exploding myriad of data and opportunities can be confusing and in many cases simply overwhelming. With this in mind trying to find the right partners to work with be it technology based, data based or simply people experienced based is also becoming much more important – and competitive too! No one person or agency can do all the ‘digital stuff’ as it’s simply too wide a range of skills to accommodate in one place.

Furthermore, a growing share of media will be delivered via technology and the techniques and learnings we’ve developed in our industry will increasingly impact other parts of the wider media world. For example, it’s easy to see the knowledge we’ll gather this year with regards to video ads shifting into other platforms which carry video content. The delivery of this content and advertising will increasingly be determined by set of rules, and this will require proper planning, proper use of technology and proper use of the results rolled together. It’s an ‘open source’ world where different specialists will need to work with other specialists or potentially loose out. And these teams of people will need to determine if they are offering the ‘thinking’ bit, the ‘doing’ bit or even trying, in rarer cases, to cover both. Any partner you may choose to work with has to be able to articulate ‘why’ they are recommending you do something rather than simply telling you ‘what’ they are recommending and leaving you to translate back to the ‘why’.

There’s no doubt that lots of people are doing lots of things with lots of digital media. But having lots of things don’t necessarily mean better. Quality not just quantity whether it be site visitors, tracked site arrivals from a campaign or the number of staff at an agency has justifiably emerged as a key criteria. More is not always more, and the digital world can deliver immense transparency across all facets of our businesses. This movement to quality means we’re growing up as an industry. As we grow up we increasingly gain trust in digital media – the same trust that advertisers have placed in more traditional media for years. And as that trust spreads so digital budgets will grow.

The question which then remains is; are you best placed to take advantage of this with your current digital approach, thinking or offering?

Pete Robins
Founder
agenda21