The digital media revolution we’ve seen over the past few years has meant that, slowly but surely, clients are taking the plunge and committing increasing proportions of their media budgets to online advertising. The economic downturn has not stopped this movement and 2008 saw a year on year increase in online advertising spend of 17%, meaning it accounted for almost a fifth of advertising spend (Internet Advertising Bureau).

Display advertising now accounts for over 19% of online advertising spend. However, despite the fact that online display campaigns often have a brand objective, the measurements traditionally used to judge them have been more strongly associated with direct response activity. Whilst metrics such as page impressions, clicks, site visits or conversions can be useful, they do not provide any insight into the effect that advertising has on the consumers’ opinion of the brand. Historically, both clients and media agencies have found it difficult to ascertain the overall impact a campaign has had on brand engagement and to identify which specific elements of it are working most effectively for them.

Unlike TV which has BARB, online advertising does not have an industry standard for audience measurement. As a result there is a distinct lack of accountability in terms of which specific audiences are reached by the different elements of an online campaign. This limits the information available to planners and hampers their ability to refine future online plans and increase efficiency.

ævolve has developed a new research tool, æon, to address both of these key issues for display advertising.

What is æon?
æon is a new campaign evaluation tool designed to enable you to make your online display advertising work harder. It provides valuable information which enables you to:

• fine tune site selection to reach target audiences more efficiently in future activity

• secure the current, and future, use of online as an effective branding medium

• select the most efficient display formats, e.g. rich media vs standard format

• Select the most effective creative executions

• Adjust your campaigns to deliver effectively brand outcomes for different target audiences

Deliverables
Targeting efficiency: æon will provide demographic profiles of the audience your campaign is reaching by individual sites. This will provide a concrete measure of your demographic targeting efficiency and tell you which sites have been most efficiently reaching your target audiences, as well as reach and frequency metrics.

Brand effectiveness: æon will establish the effectiveness of your campaign on KPI measures such as brand awareness, brand favourability and purchase consideration.

Creative effectiveness: Other digital evaluation tools attempt to uncover creative effectiveness by showing creative executions and asking respondents’ opinions whereas æon uses a sophisticated statistical modelling process to infer the effects of different creative executions and formats on brand perceptions.

Case study
ævolve recently undertook a project for a well known retailer who wanted to understand whether their online activity was raising awareness of their key marketing messages.
æon was able to:

• show the advertiser the efficiency of the campaign in reaching their target audiences

• confirm that the campaign had been delivered in all agreed and suitable locations

• quantify uplifts in advertising awareness and purchase consideration driven by the online advertising

• measure an overall increase in agreement with KPI attitudes of 5% for the exposed audience

• illustrate that the effects were greater upon the female audience as opposed to the male

• prove that rich media advertising was more than twice as effective as standard formats

 

For further information about æon please contact Jonny Protheroe:

jonny.protheroe@aemedia.com