:: ADS & MARKETING

Successful ads to become interactive
Tuesday, April 10 2001
by Tony O'Brien

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Net-based advertising is set to grow to EUR6 billion - or five percent of all advertising spent - by in the year 2005, according to new research.

In order to fully exploit this potential, marketers must take account of new interactive scenarios and advertisements that mirror consumer behaviour, according to a new report from Forrester Research.

To take advantage of the new situation, marketers will have to drop traditional one-way, one-time, one-size-fits-all advertising campaigns.

The study, carried out by Forrester Research of Amsterdam, said the challenge of integrating off-line and on-line campaigns will be compounded by the emergence of new interactive devices such as mobile phones and iDTV set-top boxes. These new channels will be vying for the same consumers' attention and advertisers' budgets.

"Marketers must embrace the more ambitious, integrative framework of digital marketing - redefining their goals, their roles and their metrics around interactive scenarios," said Forrester analyst Diana Janssen.

Such scenarios should be designed to create end-to-end, cross-channel consumer experiences, the company said. To exploit the full potential of interactivity, marketers would have to drop traditional "one-way, one-time, one-size-fits-all advertising campaigns."

Instead, executives must use interactive scenarios in fitting with interactive media, she stated.

For the report, "Rewriting Online Ads," Forrester spoke with 31 leading advertisers - 17 large clicks-and-mortar companies and 14 dot.coms - along with 28 on-line media and ad agencies.

It advised that in order to create an integrated consumer experience, interactive scenarios required teams to co-operate within the firm across departmental boundaries of communications, direct marketing, sales and customer service.

Executives should use the Net's tracking capacity to measure advertising effectiveness across all stages of interactive scenarios - from awareness creation to customer service. In addition, they should judge their performance-based deals through new, more pointed result measures rather than just click-through rates and sales, said the report.

Managers will then sit down with media planners to reproduce the winning placement and scenario combinations.

"Marketers should assign specific tasks to best-of-breed suppliers and entrust the creative process to dedicated shops while allocating production, distribution and technology deployment to traditional and on-line ad agencies," said Janssen.


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