The digital campaign ends on a positive note, with solid results, and you put together some kind of wrap-up or “post-mortem” report summarizing how the campaign performed. Included in the report are all kinds of metrics, ranging from CPMs, to effective CPCs to potentially CPL (cost per lead) and/or CPA (cost per acquisition) analyses. After going through the results and explaining what everything means, and maybe even after supplying some industry benchmarks to provide a point of reference, you get a response something like this:

“this is great, be we were actually hoping to see a lower eCPC”

or maybe this

“thanks for the report, but we were expecting a lower CPA than what the campaign produced.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve been involved in launching, managing and reporting on online advertising campaigns for more than 9 years, and I have consistently seen this type of response from clients (particularly newer ones). Recently, after receiving a similar response, someone from our team had the courage to ask the client what results they seen from some of their traditional media buys for the same campaign. The client responded “oh, we don’t know what that produced.”

So why the higher expectations for digital media?

The question arises, is this a sign of a trend away from online advertising to other media or is it just the result of the overall ad spend pie decreasing so much that online was unable to escape it’s effects?

I say the latter.

More than anything, it was the result of one of the most irrational pull-backs in media ad spend in advertising history, more a result of an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and anxiety than a concern about the ROI of digital advertising. 

Check out this LA Times piece discussing the news and my quotes on the news.

A successful mobile initiative by Land Rover was discussed and compared to  online marketing. The main point of this discussion was that although mobile advertising CPMs are significantly higher than those for online, Land Rover’s mobile lead-gen campaigns have resulted in higher ROIs than online campaigns due to the advertiser’s ability to directly reach consumers on their cell phones.

Some key takeaways:

-You don’t have to overwhelm clients/advertisers with fancy, complicated mobile initiatives. Great things can be done with simple SMS campaigns. This is also a smart way to test the waters and make your client feels comfortable in this emerging (not considered emerging anymore at the conference) marketing arena.

-Mobile providers like Virgin Mobile and media giants like AOL and Yahoo are knee-deep in creating mobile-specific sites and content to extend their brands and accessibility to consumers. They are believers in the power of directly reaching consumers.

-The iPhone is a bigger deal than most people think, and this is not due to the cool factor, but mainly because it has revolutionized the way mobile media and content are consumed. The iPohone has therefore paved the way for other phones to come as well as forced brands and sites to offer more to a tech-thirsty generation.

-There is still a lot to learn about mobile marketing—there are mistakes to be made, and it is from these mistakes that advertisers will learn how mobile fits in their overall strategy.

Isabella Bejarano, Sr. Account Executive

In this guide I found an interesting article on Hispanic mobile advertising that highlights the importance and success of including mobile in the Hispanic marketing mix. Not to my surprise, I found that although online and general technology adoption among Hispanics lags behind the general market–it’s no big secret that the Hispanic segment significantly over-indexes in mobile phone usage.

In 2007 the Mobile Marketing Association found that 75% of Hispanics own a mobile phone and use it regularly.  Mobile marketing messages are also more successful amongst Hispanics, particularly coupons, status alerts, and sweepstakes or contests. Text message usage also increased dramatically, over 39% in the last 12 months according to a recent comScore M: Metrics study.

Sites like MTV Tr3s and social network MocoSpace offer mobile Web sites, and increasing mobile Web traffic to these sites proves that Hispanics are active and engaged mobile users. Additionally, premiere advertisers like P&G, IKEA, Coca Cola, and McDonald’s have jumped on board mobile advertising for Hispanics in an effort to deliver highly targeted and interactive mobile content to engaged users.

Evidently, mobile advertising is an essential component when marketing to Hispanics, and recognizing this sophisticated, fast-growing mobile user segment will definitely become more and more essential as mobile technology and adoption continues to grow.

Isabella Bejarano, Sr. Account Executive