BUYING DIGITAL MEDIA

Buying advertising has always been a bit of a shot in the dark.

Digital media ads haven’t improved things much. But a new initiative announced last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a cooperative non-profit comprised of more than 375 leading media and technology companies who are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States, may improve things.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau has engaged Media Bank, a leading think tank determined to quick march all media buyers towards a cross-platform efficiency, to see if we can set some common advertising standards for E-business. As might be expected, there aren’t even uniform standards on what the elements in interactive advertising are called.

You’ve certainly heard the old cliché in the advertising industry that half of all advertising money is simply wasted – and nobody can ever reliably figure out which half is wasted. That dilemma lives on in trying to calculate the exact impact of an online banner or a video roll – whether it appears on the CNN homepage or the MySpace page of a 13-year-old obsessing on the latest download from Pink. And just try putting a reliable marketing value on a product placement in a straight-to-DVD movie.

Exasperated corporate communicators often compile a rough and dirty cross-media traffic report to appease their bosses. But a sales campaign’s impressive report of multi-million “impressions,” for example, may be nothing but a sloppy and unreliable tally totaling up the alleged and inflated circulation of print publications ... plus the dubious audience numbers that broadcasters brag for a program on which a televised commercial might have appeared ... plus the so-called “eyeball” projections that web publishers claim when their hidden meters and snares detect a webpage visitor.

In the end, measuring techniques for advertising in digital media are still as flimsy as those in other, more traditional media – although what numbers there are come more instantaneously online.

At its most fundamental, however, no one knows exactly what really has happened whether a reader has opened a print edition of Forbes to a Lexis ad or “viewed” a MySpace website pushing a Wal-Mart holiday guide – let alone whether the consumer has even truly paid attention to the ad. We humans have such a facility for tuning out the most outlandish distractions.

Of course, you can certainly and reliably log things like how many people actually opened a digital online “page” on which a banner is running – whether it is a corporate website, the CNN website, or a YouTube page featuring a cat watching squirrels. And you can set real digital tripwires so that the folks that click through the banner to dedicated websites are reliably counted. But in the end, client comfort will come the old fashion way – when sales go up and revenue flow swells.

So keep an eye on both MediaBank and IAB’s E-business subcommittee to see how this all turns out. That old challenge about wasting half of the ad dollar comes from the late, great Philadelphian John Wanamaker who founded one of the first and greatest department stores – long since absorbed by Macy Inc. which also now principally does business as either Macy’s or wholly owned Bloomingdale’s.

By the way, Macy’s online business at www.macy.com is quickly becoming its strongest sector, according to its February financial reports. But if old John Wanamaker, the father of modern advertising, were still alive, he would still be pounding the desk and demanding to know which half of his money is being wasted by the damned on-line ad department.