Last year the percentage of purchases made online exceeded those made in-store, for the first time ever.
More and more consumers are going online to shop and research their next purchase. And they’re smarter shoppers too, often using websites to double-check offers in store and to help them get the best value for money possible. These new savvy shoppers are causing a huge shift in marketing spend, away from traditional channels like direct mail. Marketers are flooding the internet, looking for opportunities to get their brand viewed by potential customers who are browsing the internet. This is both a huge opportunity and potential threat to businesses.
By using online channels brands are more visible than ever before, and to more people than ever. This means that their opportunity to sell is substantially increased, but they are also creating a holistic affect whereby every step of the consumer buying decision is being affected by brand awareness and perception.
Because online advertising is still a relatively new science, it’s not perfect. Rarely do businesses and marketing departments devote as much resource to controlling online advertising as they have done with more traditional advertising, such as print media, broadcast, or brochures. Because online advertising is relatively new, advertisers and brand owners are understandably focussing on the best way of capitalising on the opportunities that are available to them. Yet with every opportunity, there are potential pitfalls. By ploughing funds into online advertising businesses open themselves up to some degree of reputational risk.
If we think about the way the system works at the moment, it’s easy to see how online advertising can be a potential risk. Currently, advertising agencies work with the brand to create the content and then it’s seeded out into the internet. This initial stage is highly targeted and greatly beneficial for the brand. The agency will work closely with their clients to identify the areas where their advertising will deliver the most value. So if you are a sports company, you appear on the sports pages of a national online media title. But after these initial targeted placements, we enter into a problematic grey area.
The advertising content, which the brand agrees to and the advertising agency initially places, is then sent to the big internet exchanges. From there, the brand can lose control of where its adverts are being placed. It may become something akin to a lottery of where the advertising shows up. Due to the wide-reaching nature of online advertising, campaigns are often judged on traffic and impression numbers. And these tend to be big numbers.
Until recently, marketing directors have been fairly content with their campaigns, just so long as they can point to the figures in their end of year reports. However, when online advertising is carried out like this, it carries with it a degree of reputational risk. In the very worst cases, when brands allow themselves to enter the great wide yonder of the internet, they can sometimes appear on illegal sites. But even if these extremes do not transpire, brands can ultimately end up on sites which deliver zero value to a campaign.
There were numerous examples of retailers caught up in the horse meat scandal, appearing on websites linked to the welfare of horses. And we’ve also seen a whole range of broadband companies promising the fastest internet speeds, whilst appearing on sites offering to illegally downloadable content. Most recently, brands found themselves embroiled in a very difficult PR situation, when their adverts were funding controversial social media website ask.fm. It’s difficult to estimate the brand damage inflicted by these unfortunate circumstances, but it’s clear that more control should be given back to the marketers themselves so that they can decide where their adverts appear.
Additionally, aside from the reputational issues, it means a portion of the precious advertising spend has been wasted. As with all divisions since the downturn in 2008, marketing teams have been squeezed harder than ever. It’s the classic tactic that when a recession hits, marketing is hit first and the deepest - a questionable move given you need marketing to sell your wares.
Thankfully, there are options available to take care of these types of issues. Content verification platforms give the power back to the brand, allowing them to cross-reference key words where their advertising is being placed and ensuring they have the opportunity to control where their adverts appear online. And because they have a better idea of where their advertising is appearing, they can better analyse the success of the campaign, to ensure they wring out the insights and apply it to the next round of advertising.
Advertisers and salespeople rely on reputation to gain trust from the consumer which then encourages them to hand over their hard-earned cash to the brand owners. It’s an old saying that it can take a lifetime to build a reputation and a second to lose it. Well, that’s potentially what brands are doing right now, every time they sign off an online advertising campaign and allow their content to be sent out into the internet abyss without any control over where it eventually lands. The holistic approach to selling is only as strong as its weakest link. It’s time brands fortified the online advertising link, or face the consequences of reputational and financial damage that will undermine their entire campaign efforts.
By Andrew Goode, Chief Operation Officer at Project Sunblock.
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