This blog post succinctly articulates the main issue holding significant brand marketing dollars back from the Web today: the lack of a cogent model and methodology whereby brand marketing can be evaluated for its effectiveness in widening the TOP of the customer acquisition and sales funnel (both online and offline) rather than increasing velocity THROUGH the funnel directly through to online sales.
Today, almost every marketing dollar spent online is judged according to the direct downstream ROI it generates in terms of direct response ecommerce sales. As Joe says in his post, "...the sum value of all impressions on the Internet can only be equal in value to the sum total of all ROI on fully optimized direct response campaigns." The conclusion, of course, being that, "...there is still no accounting for branding..."
All other channels (TV, print, radio, etc.) don't work this way... their marketing effectiveness is measured "ex post" by correlating these investments with subsequent (and, where possible, attributable) upticks in either revenues in a given geographic market and/or something like "unaided positive brand awareness among target audience" (usually measured through expensive and time-consuming market research exercises, which we all know have significant inherent bias baked in).
Until this problem is solved in a clever, widely adopted way, there is likely to be a continuing gap between the size of the potential brand reach opportunity online (which is growing every day, with the steady increases in Web usage by American and international consumers at the expense of other forms of media and content) and the willingness of marketers (and their proxies on Madison Avenue) to accelerate the shift of brand marketing campaign dollars on to the Web.
An interesting and significant challenge that all marketing agencies who focus on the Web, as we do, will continue to struggle with.
Cheers.
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