Digital Media Sales Academy

The conversation threads in this online classroom have now switched to a private classroom only accessible for teams taking part in training programmes in this area. If your team are interested in this type of training, workshops or strategy development then simply email Admissions@DigitalTrainingAcademy.com to find out more.

If you're the graduate of one of our Digital Training Academies then add your questions in this space using the comment field at the bottom of this page. Our management consultants will answer them in a batch during the next week...

If my client is only putting 1000 euros into an online campaign, what should I do?

Summary of key client objections and how we overcome them!

Digital Media Sales Academy: Croatia
Why are advertisers in many markets slow to understand the potential of online advertising?

Digital Media Sales Academy: Croatia

How do you sell online advertising in a market dominated by television?

Thanks Andrew.

Understanding online media planning still rests on the basis of offline planning, but it does go a lot further. The models of developing reach and frequency through digital media offer the promise of greater accuracy, but without enough confidence in a single digital toolkit, they lack the uniformity that for example BARB has developed in television planning here in the UK. If you're new to the sector then mayeb take a look at one of the handouts from our Digital Media Planning Academy asa way of getting up to speed with a few of the concepts...

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/insight/2008/02/getting_to_grips_with_online_m.php

How do media planners decide which sites to use? Our consumer magazines just are not getting a look in and unlike dealing with the offline agencies who know our brand, we really struggle with the digital specialists.

Why clickthrough doesn’t do much for measuring online advertising

“The ad only works if it’s clicked.” Ever heard that? It’s one of the issues that’s plagued the industry since the very first days of online advertising, yet how often have you ‘clicked’ on a TV commercial? The obsession with click through rates is a classic example of how online advertising so often gets measured based on a criteria that would never be applied in classic media. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a direct response model in online advertising, nor deny that search engines have built their whole business on driving traffic and clicks. But what it does underscore is that when marketers think about branding they often bring with them a mindset of direct response thinking that can be at best unhelpful, and is normally just plainly out of place.

Here are a few perspectives that can be useful in looking at the problem:
- The graphical advert should be able to convey the message without demanding a click
- For advertising to work, the graphical advert needs to be treated as the advertising medium, with the brand awareness, impact and image statements delivered inside the creative
- 99.9% of graphical adverts don’t get clicked on, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a brand building effect
- Television, outdoor, radio and print were never clickable
- by switching the debate from clicks to ‘reach’ or ‘frequency’ there’s a more mature marketing conversation to be had

Here are a few reasons why marketers need to think beyond the click…
- Fish where the fish are: use the advertising in the media site to deliver the exposures, marketers shouldn’t see their own websites as the place where the brand messaging takes place
- The brand effect of web banners can be explained and structured; there and tens of thousands of studies that prove how online banners build brands (the directors of Digital ran the very first of these in Europe back in the mid 90s)
- Clicks only count the immediate action: on a strong media website the content may be so desirable that the audiences do not want to leave it, yet the research shows a tight correlation between the people who see advertising messages (and don’t click) and those who magically appear on a client website an hour or day later
- When measuring clickthrough rates (CTRs), most marketers forget that one person may be exposed to the advertising several times and this means that the click rate per person (rather than exposure) is very different

The process of persuasion in advertising is complicated and has many steps. To help marketers uncover more about what this means and how it works, we developed a model that you can download and use in presentations. More details, here…

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/03/best_practice_in_online_advert.php

Clients' only interested in Clicks!?!! objection handling...getting the client understanding the the value of exposure... any tips?

Getting started in online media sales

Audience is the starting point. Without a strong audience, even the best person has nothing to sell. Begin by looking for ways to boost your traffic by acquiring more audiences from search engines and online partners and ensuring your content is quickly and easily discoverable. Put the energy into building the audience first and then let the growth create a sellable commodity.

Once you are focussed on developing the audiences, here are five simple starting steps in getting set for online advertising sales.

Develop a simple set of ad formats (use those from the Digital Media Sales Academy as the starting point)
Create ‘charter packages’ using a sponsorship model to take key clients onto the web with you
Train your team in the basics for online sales (look out for the next Academy dates for public courses if you are a small publisher especially
Put in place the analytics you need to be able to track the growth of online advertising and audiences, reporting the right information at the right speed back to your advertisers
Build up an audience database of email addresses so you can begin email newsletter publishing that will take content and links to them (next programme in the UK is 7 March) http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/online_advertising_sales.php

Remember that Digital’s tutors often come into companies to help out in the development of business plans and sales operations early on, so why not give us a call?

How do we get started in online advertising? We’re completely new to this.

Improving the quality of registrations

There’s a challenging balance between capturing audience data and capturing high quality audience data. At a simple level, the bigger the incentive, the better the quality of the data.

It’s a fair exchange to ask for some simple contact details in exchange for reading the content of a website for free, but this is just the start. Tagging your content and seeing who views what will help you build up richer profiles than you’ll get from asking people, and even of there are no demographics attached to the viewer, you’ll still know the key things most advertisers want to know: are they interested in the right products?

Try offering something that involves printed materials having to be sent. That might mean you need to give them a coupon, offer, or prize draw, but it’s a way of helping boost the quality of address details providing the inventive is high enough.

One of the most successful tactics is to build up profile data gradually over time, and not asking too much at the starting moment of registration. Smart publishing systems will let users see some of the information in terms of their claimed preferences, and encourage them to edit and add to it.

Try finding small incentives you can give them to gain additional information. It might be access to a different service, the download of a white paper, or the participation in a survey or poll.

We can cover some of these issues on the next Digital Publishing Strategy Academy - 27 March http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/building_stronger_online_publi.php

But they also come up in the Digital Media Sales Academy (next programme in the UK is 7 March) http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/2008/03/online_advertising_sales.php

How to we tell if registrations in our community sites are legitimate?

Understanding Wikipedia demands an alternative perspective

The Wiki Foundation is unlike almost any publishing company. We interviewed UK CEO Alison Wheeler to explore their beliefs and the implications for publishers: http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2007/10/alison_wheeler_uk_ceo_wikimedi.php

Wikipedia: what’s their model?

Self-service is the key to online classfieds

The big success for online classifieds has been the migration to the self service model. By creating a framework that advertisers can use easily, there’s the scope to let them build out as many listings as they need in a way that’s time efficient for all parties. One of the toolkits that caught our eye was CityTools from internet veteran Bob Cauthorn and when we last interviewed him we wrote up some of the ideas he believes are driving the next generation of online classifieds… http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2008/01/bob_cauthorn.php

Are there alternative models for classifieds?

The next phase of online advertising products: examples from Google
We’ve written an answer about this here in the form of a short article http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2008/01/online_ad_products_more_innova.php

What are Google’s next online advertising products?

Comparing sites without buying toolkits

If you’re not buying the NetRatings or Comscore rankings in Europe, then Alexa is a good free alternative. There’s an example of the output for different British newspapers just here http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/web_audiences_in_media_propert/ or follow this link into Alexa and manipulate the source data: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mozilla.com?site0=Guardian.co.uk&site1=metro.co.uk&y=r&z=3&h=300&w=610&range=3m&size=Medium

How do we compare online audiences between media sites quickly?

Selecting an online sales house

We’ve written an answer about this here http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/enter_your_digital_training_ac/ and put together a simple training handout for you about the key issues, here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/preacademy_reading/

Should we use an online sales house to clear our spare adspace?

Trends in online advertising

There are many ways to examine this, but we’ve highlighted a few key trends and placed them in the Digital Training Academy pages, here: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/publishingstrategyclassroom/strategy_online_advertising_tr/

What are the big online advertising trends for the next 18 months?

The jargon is a barrier for everyone

Every industry has its jargon, but the digital marketing sector inherited all the language of media, marketing, IT and telecoms. The jargon acts as a barrier to those new to online marketing, and can still confuse those with experience. It helps if everyone uses the same language for all materials and communications, and if that language is as clear as practical. If you use many of the technical terms, then take a moment to make sure all stakeholders are clear on what they mean in this context.

Here are some of the terms you’ll regularly encounter…

CPA – cost per action
A standard industry measure for selling advertising on websites. The advertiser pays for each visitor that takes some specifically defined action in response to an ad beyond simply clicking on it. For example, a visitor might visit an advertiser's site and request to be subscribed to a newsletter.

CPC – Cost per click
A standard industry measure for selling advertising on websites. The advertiser pays for each user that clicks on their advertisement. The model is popular in graphical advertising, but dominates the search advertising market.

CPD – cost per day

CPM – Cost per thousand
A standard industry measure for selling advertising on websites. This measure is taken from print advertising. The "M" has nothing to do with "mega" or million. It's taken from the Roman numeral for "thousand".

And remember that some terms have several meanings
• CPC can sometimes be used to mean ‘cost per customer’ rather than cost per click
• CPA can sometimes be used to mean ‘cost per acquisition’ rather than cost per action

To help digital teams keep on top of all this, we created this little free service: www.DigitalJargonBuster.org – here is the listing of terms we were asked to define: http://www.digitaljargonbuster.org/djb/Category:Jargon

What do the CPCs/CPMs actually stand for. I'm a sales manager at a national newspaper having to explain all this to my classified telesales teams and they're getting confused about the jargon.

Help!

Online advertising trading models

Online advertising can be bought and sold using a vast range of different trading models. Cost per thousand (CPM) remains one of the most popular, but a common range of options you’ll encounter includes: CPM, CPD, CPC, CPA, uniques, time, sponsorship, search, email, viral, microsites and many more.

At Digital we see a continuum that connects all of these models together. At one end there are trading models that revolve around the space media owners can provide (the number of impressions or views), while at the other there are models which are drawn from sharing the revenues that come from a successful campaign. The various different models like cost-per-action (CPA) or cost-per-click (CPC) that sit between these represent a balance that shares the commercial risk of a campaign between the website and the client (or its agency). The trading model you use should really depend on what your marketing objectives are. If the objective is to boost branding metrics then the sponsorship or impression models are generally most appropriate. If on the other hand the objectives are all about generating immediate leads, then models that pay on a ‘per action’ basis are probably more appropriate. Complex campaigns may involve several different mechanics all working at the same time and these generate a hybrid model that draws on strands from across the continuum.

There’s no precise rule and it will vary between campaigns as well as with the preferences of different media agencies and media owners, but the online platforms offer a much broader variety of trading models than you’ll find in any other media channel.

That can present additional challenges for media sales teams, so agreeing the sales policy is key. Invest time in planning a sales policy that covers the different models, and calculate their returns carefully.

What is the most common model for advertising sales on-line?

Thanks for the training course this autumn. We're working through the weekend to get answers to briefs from agencies and I'm keen to hear your thoughst about how we can best manage the process.

Ideas REALLY welcome!

Audience measurement: are new models on the way?

Since the start of web publishing we’ve used page impressions and unique users as the core of the currency. When pages were simple HTML and when all marketers were interested in was a simple reach figure, this worked well, but as web marketing has evolved, the needs of both client and media owner have changed. That’s why the currencies will be evolving over the next few years and why website strategists need to pay attention to their key metrics to ensure the right information is coming out of their analysis tools.
The page impression has been under the hammer since the creation of AJAX. Sites like Second Life (one page) make a mockery of what was once the primary measure of audience data, and that’s why there is a growing groundswell that is more interested with the duration of engagement than the number of pages used up in a session. Duration gives a more realistic measure of involvement (albeit with caps about active keystroke and mouse events so we don’t start counting people downloading their music overnight). This leads towards measures of engagement and intensity which are just as critical for the brand marketer to understand as they are for the media owner.
Similarly the idea of ‘unique users’ has enjoyed high criticism for a long time. Since 2000 when cookie churn became an identified problem, many website owners have mistook their ‘user’ figures to imply ‘unique users’. Data from NetRatings and others has painted an accurate picture of how cookie churn and cookie blocking can over-inflate the audience figures for a website, and the models to recalibrate have been poor at best. It’s still safer to reduce back down to a daily figure than to try multiplying up all of the numbers to get a monthly reach figure that could be over 50% out.
In the web analytics classes at the European Emetrics summit, we outlined some of the challenges with the Web 1.0 metrics and gave an overview of the issues and some practical hints and tips media owners and brand marketers can use to get back onto the right track. Try the video and the accompanying lecture notes to learn more about the problems, and then consider the implications for your own analytics tools. The web offers the promise of near perfect accountability of marketing spend and we’re short changing our customers if we don’t have accurate figures about the numbers of real people who are exposed in a timely way to their communications.

Hi Danny,

In my notes I have written...Where are we heading: New models for trading: time, uniques

Time, uniques>??? can you explain please?

Thanks

The first big studies were run in the UK where the ad budgets justified the research, but a study I've really enjoyed learning about is from the French media industry. It proves both branding and the sales uplift and uses an excellent methodology: exposed and controlled cells in France, with and without the online elements of the campaign...

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/articles/2006/09/online_ads_drive_offline_sales.php

Is there any research that proves how the web creates sales on the high street?

Remember that there are dozens of tools on our Digital Training Academies that can help you put into practice the ideas we disucss here. If you missed the last Digital Training Academies in your country, then check the termtime pages to see when the next public access courses are in your areas: http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/termtime/
... and remember that most of the time firms invite us inside their company to train the whole team in one go! Email me for details of how we could do this for you and your team. We're waiting to help boost your group's output straight away!

THE INTEGRATION CHALLENGE

Integrating digital marketing into communications plans means changing the way a firm behaves. Change is difficult, and for many it can be uncomfortable. Even if there are huge opportunities out there for getting the new models right, people are naturally risk averse and it’s easier to repeat the same behaviour today as last year (the same media plans, marketing models, use of marketing channels etc).

The integration challenge is as much about the cultural framework of an organisation as it is about the rational arguments. If the management culture places a heavy burden of evidence on all new ideas before resources are released, then it follows that innovation within the firm will be stifled. That repression of innovation could take many forms, but often it can be as simple as a sceptical marketing or finance director, asking for incredible ROI metrics before rocking the marketing boat. The irony is that when the prevailing winds are hurling the same boat towards the rocks, common sense should have the whole team hoisting the sail and steering to safety. The larger the firm and the taller the management hierarchy, in general, the more stifled the innovation.

Successful online services tend to have a common history: rapid prototyping, constant refinement, live testing, and an adaptive path that encourages continued evolution. The difficult reality is that it’s only once the web services are up and running that the real testing can begin. However you try to model customer behaviour in the lab, the live experience almost without exception throws up surprises, and these are the triggers that lead to discovering how online services can be more useful. From the order of stories on the front page of a news site, to the steps in the conversion to sale in an online store, to the product information pages of a corporate site, follow the simple steps of launch, listen and learn.

Why are marketers reluctant to integrate social media and other digital channels?

CALCULATING UK ONLINE ADSPEND - GETTING THE NUMBERS TO ADD UP

Lots of people question whether the online adspend figures are accurate in the UK. The details of the methodology are in the full report, but the bottom line is that PWC carry out a survey of media owners. They talk with finance directors under a web of non-disclosure agreements and then get the details of the actual cash spent with the online sites. It’s really robust because it understates the market every time. I helped set up the project in 1997 (it was a real slog in the early years) and ran it until the start of 2005, so I’m pretty comfortable taking questions about methodology. It’s way more robust than most media in most countries, and because it’s based on the cash amounts you can be sure that the industry really is this large.

However, there are some notable exceptions:
- None of the spend on microsites is included
- Search engine optimization can’t be tracked, so that’s not in there
- Most affiliate spend is outside (though this can be a little grey)

As for the other media, that’s the methodology and the data that the Advertising Association publish through the guys at the WARC research centre. If you have more questions then post them here.

You can download a copy of some of the latest stats and analysis here... http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/insight/2007/10/uk_digital_advertising_market.html

For data from other markets email the team at Digital and we'll point you towards people who can help

What's the methodology for calculating it? The numbers don't look comparable to other media.

NEED MORE RESEARCH?

Proving the case in online advertising is much easier when it’s supported by solid research. In the early days of the web, it was pretty much just down to a marketer’s intuition, but today you have a rich range of research tools and papers that you can rely on. At Digital, we collated some of the strongest into a whole ‘Digital Research Academy’, but Academy members can also use the online research library as a way of seeing some of the highlights. Here are a few tips to look out for:

- Online adspend: most countries have strong data about the amount spent in online advertising. If you’ve been on our Digital Media Sales Academy or Digital Media Planning Academy, then you’ll have probably seen them in detail. Look out for the latest insight reports we’ve published that provide a commentary on the scale and trajectory of that growth www.DigitalStrategyConsulting.com/insight

- XMOS: The US online ad industry provided a series of powerful integrated media research exercises that proved the optimal mix of online media. You’ll find a couple of the summaries here www.DigitalTrainingAcademy.com/research

… and you can use them to uncover what the optimal mix of media should have been for specific campaigns. What particularly resonated with me (I ran a roadshow to UK agencies about this in 2003) was the gap between where marketers place their budgets, and where their audiences had moved to. Even for a simple consumer good (like a bar of soap), back in 2001 the research was showing that the web should have been a 15% medium for a campaign rather than a 1% medium.

- Ad effectiveness research: There are over 100,000 online ad campaigns that have been researched and quantified; their impacts explored to show you how the web helped boost brands. You’ll find the details of a few in the main Digital Media Sales Academy classroom pages, here at Digital.

Where can I find more research about online ad effectiveness?

WHAT IS WEB 3.0?

We've been asked lots about this in training over the last year. Sometimes as a joke and sometimes in all seriousness. Like much digital future-gazing, you can never be sure what the next step is, but when we interviewed Joel De Rosnay about the models for computing and the collision of the virtual and physical worlds, he had some pretty clear ideas - Web 3.0 could arrive sooner than you think. Lock down the digital glasses, plug yourself into the grid, read the interview, and then follow the links... http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/thoughtleaders/2007/07/joel_de_rosnay.html

(And let us know what you think afterwards!)

TRACKING ONLINE AD CONVERSIONS

When the success of a campaign is being measured in the return on investment the client sees in sales, then getting the measurement and metrics right at the start is key. Many clients need to invest in the right analytics tools to ensure they can relate a click to a sale, and when several entry points and source websites could be linked to just one customer (after all we don’t all buy just on one visit to a site), there’s an additional challenge for how leads are attributed.

The value of each lead will vary based on their propensity to buy, the site (and brand’s) propensity to convert, and the margin the business makes from the sale. Savvy classically trained marketers will also factor in the lifetime value of their customers as the way of making sure they get the numbers spot on.

All of this works well in theory for an online business, but where it gets messy is in the world of blended retailing: our friend shows us the latest iPhone, we review a product online, we go into the store to play with it, and then we order on the web. These types of customer journeys are incredibly hard to track, and many retailers, consumer brands and business services are still doing little more than making educated guesses. The good news is that help is at hand: econometric modelling, smart statistical analysis, and some survey based customer feedback, can all help figure out how the model is working and what is generating the sales. But this remains one of the most complicated elements of online advertising measurement, and for many situations there simply isn’t the data in place to be able to confidently say exactly how the sales were generated.

How do online advertisers track and account for their conversions of searches into actual transactions / sales.

(a)Obviously if the vendor is purely operating an online business it's easy but where customers use the internet to research and go on to buy from a call centre e.g. Motor Insurance or Travel Agents the results would surely be skewed?

(b) Do online advertisers make allowances for transactions / sales that originated via another stimulus such as a directory, TV ad or billboard?

COMMENTS ON SPECIFIC COMPANIES, THEIR PERFORMANCE AND THEIR PLANS?

We get asked this a great deal, but on public access training courses we never make comments about individual companies and their plans.

UNDERSTANDING SEARCH SPEND IN THE UK

The numbers for search engine advertising in the UK are high, but they’re also accurate. More than half of all the online advertising monies spent on media go into search engines in the UK, and they’re concentrated among just a couple of firms. From 2004-2007, the UK was among only two countries where the market leader (Google) declared their figures, and that’s why the numbers here are particularly interesting.

The data is collated by PricewaterhouseCoopers, under a series of non-disclosure agreements with the media owners, and for that reason the numbers are considered among the most accurate in all media reporting (they represent the actual cash being billed). However, the data doesn’t cover any of the spend that goes into the techniques of search engine optimisation – both on-page and off-page. That data remains far more elusive, and while some of it can be pinpointed to a small number of agencies, it’s much tougher to accurately count because there are so many elements of every website’s design these days that includes SEO.

For more on the intricacies of counting and data, why not join a Digital Analytics & Research Academy?

I have two questions related with the training:

1. Does the high percent of budgets, aforementioned in the report, allocated
for advertising in search engines concern exclusively paid forms (sponsored
links, AdWords, etc.) or does it also include the costs of positioning
services and their optimization? What is the relation of these forms of
promotion in your country?

2. What is your opinion on Google's plans
concerning intensive development of personalized searching and what
consequences do they see of both advertising in search engines and
positioning of services?

HOW DO I MEASURE TRAFFIC?

Broadly there are two routes: using the server data (often called 'server-side' measurement, 'logfile analysis' of 'publisher's statements) and the audience panels (of which ComScore and Netratings are the best known). In the Media Planning Academy and the Web Analytics Academy, we drill down on these because if you're using them daily then there are insights you need to know to understand what the data doesn't explain as much as what it does. For example, the server-side routes can be audited and in some markets such as Germany and Italy there are industry owned panels.

Alexa is effectively a panel measurement tool. It provides rankings of the sites its members visit and it is able to give trend data about a sites activity over time. The great news for budget holders is that it's free and that's one of the reasons it's proved so popular. From 2005 onwards its use has swelled, and though it doesn't offer demographic weighting to be representative of the whole country, it does offer a large panel and solid audiences.

One of the challenges is that because it only tracks at Domain Level, publishers and planners can't get the information they are really looking for about the sub-sites and sections that might prove most interesting.

If you're looking for audience data that's accurate from markets outside the UK then just be sure to check that the numbers are large enough to be reflective of the country. And remember that there are never 'perfect' numbers that give you 100% accurate data, but all of the tools will give you a good general picture.

If you need more then take a look at the Alexa site, or join us on the Web Analytics Academy.

Where does Alexa fit in measurement?

EXPLAINING METRICS

Metrics, counting and numbers: the jargon alone can be enough to put a client off, and if you cut through that is there any guarantee you're all talking about the same thing?

I've been teaching online metrics since the mid nineties, but rather than getting simpler, this is an area that's getting much more complicated. Sure there are some core metrics we all use: impressions (views), unique visitors (people) and visits (viewing occasions), but that is just the start. Part of the challenge is the massive breadth of online's offering. You'll find retail clients needing the online equivalent of footfall and in-store metrics, television stations using techniques familiar from traditional TV, and newspapers focussed on their ABCs. The trick? Learn the client's language and adjust yours to fit their framework. But that's after you've delved into the data to see what's there.

Metrics is a vast topic, so if you want more on how metrics are changing over time and what the implications are of Web 2.0 models in advertising then download some of the materials and watch the videoed lectures at http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/analytics/

How do you get people up to speed with the metrics? That can be a real challenge...

SELLING PUREPLAY ONLINE SITES

Looking at audience time and engagement is the most powerful way to highlight the differences between where a firm's customers are and where the firm focuses their budgets.

I started researching this in 1994 when digital media first began to emerge as a potential business marketing channel and a challenger to magazines and newspapers. Ever since I've been amazed at the disconnect in media planning thinking within so many firms. On the one hand audiences may be spending more than half their time with all media just online, but it's rare that there's anything close to this in the client's ad budgets.

Time is the key currency in media that everyone is chasing; all the tougher because as consumers rethink their media budgets and where they spend their focus, it's challenging to pin them down. Twenty years ago the soap operas provided unrivalled reach and guaranteed audience attention, then came the era of channel-zapping, then multi channel TV, and then the melting pot of digital. If you can prove that the audience is online – and with your property – then the logic is unchallengable.

How to focus on selling just an online property?

HELPING CLIENTS GET READY FOR ONLINE

It's odd that in 2007 the majority of British firms still don't advertise online, but when you factor in the vast number of micro businesses out there, it's clearly the case. Look into the behaviours of some of the larger brands and there too you may find an odd mismatch:

Ask if they are on the web and listen out for: "Sure we are. We have a great website."

Ask if they advertise online to boost brand metrics and drive sales the way they do through other channels and you may hear a rather uncomfortable silence.

In five years' time the media mix will be clearer and firms won't be playing catch up quite so badly. These differences will have started to narrow because the web will routinely be at the heart of all marketing. The problem is that many firms still don't have the framework for doing this today.

To help you let marketing teams discover they're missing out, try asking a few of Digital's favourite questions:

- How do your customers find you?

- What's the role of the web in helping customers research purchases? (A killer question for every big ticket brand these days)

- Which of your competitors advertise online most heavily?

- Would it be useful to reach your customers during the working day?

- Do any of the media vehicles you use offline have an online mirror to their brand? (Always a good place to start)

If the marketing team are still struggling to fit the web into their media mix then remember we run one day immersion courses for client-side marketing groups.

How do we lift people out of traditional media and get them ready to buy online?

GETTING VIDEO FORMATS RIGHT

Although video advertising has been around online since 1999, it's only in the last eighteen months that it's suddenly broken into the mainstream. The fusion with television is a landmark for the internet as a media channel and all of the arguments that drive television advertising (the emotive experience of TV, mass reach of audiences, daypart targeting) can all be echoed online.

But there's a challenge. Many brands are not set up to produce great online television advertising. They may be adept TV advertisers, but taking a TV commercial and simply transposing it to the web is only a starting point in unlocking the creative impact of online.

This first step will satisfy a group of marcoms objectives, such as:

- Extending campaign reach

- Extending campaign duration (chances are that the websites can stay on the schedule much longer than primetime TV)

- Boosting the frequency of the campaign

- Unlocking more value from the major investment in producing the TV creative initially

But it's still only a start. Savvy marketers will cut their own TV commercials just for online, they'll answer these questions to unlock greater value:

- Should the image composition be simpler for viewing on a smaller screen?

- Should the initial play be shorter than a 30 second with the encouragement to take the user on a deeper journey with a range of options?

- Should the viewing be tracked to see at what point audiences tune out?

In five year's time we really ought to have cracked this, but for now at least it's up to everyone on the campaign team to look for ways to boost the effectiveness of online TV advertising.

Selling contextual advertising and contextual TV sub-sites: how do we get agencies to be more proactive in producing proper online video ads?

COMBINING PRINT AND ONLINE MEDIA

First up learn about how the audiences of the two properties complement eachother. Find out if it's the same individuals, the same type of people, or a completely different profile (each of the three are common). This will help you understand the value proposition for the brand, for example your value proposition might be:

- Reach more of the familiar target audiences by extending your campaign onto our website; boost your coverage by another 50,000 people

- Reach a different audience segment by advertising through the website: maybe it's the same demographic and lifestyle profile, but one that's overseas

- Reinforce the impact of your magazine advertising by reinforcing the proposition online; that second wave of messaging to the audience can build on the existing marketing, taking them further in the purchase journey

Add to this the brand-halo effect of visibility within your environment and the sales case strengthens. Also remember the 2+2=5 effect: seeing messages from the same brand through several channels can multiply the effectiveness of a campaign.

Tips in selling cross media packages?