The first Web publishing heavyweight was Microsoft's MSN, which teamed with consumer goods advertising giant Unilever. The six-week study, endorsed by industry groups such as Interactive Advertising Bureau and the Advertising Research Foundation, looked at the total ROI from Unilever's television, print and online advertising campaigns for its Dove Nutrium soap. It also projected what would happen if Unilever took small portions of its TV and print budgets and re-allocated them to the Internet.
The projections, calculated by Rex Briggs of research firm Marketing Evolution, suggested that increasing online media as a percentage of total spending improved ROI significantly -- partially because advertisers can get good value from online media at its current low CPMs.
"Each element of a marketing mix should do something different," said Briggs, "but they reinforce each other."
According to the study, increasing the frequency of online ads from 1.7 impressions to 3.1 impressions over six weeks -- while reducing TV and print by 0.5 and 0.6 impressions -- would have boosted unaided brand awareness by 11 percent among the target female demographic. On the same basis, increasing online ad impressions to 12.5 impressions would have resulted in a 32 percent lift.
It was a similar story for brand image (which tested for recall of specific Nutrium message): increasing online ads to 3.1 impressions resulted in a 32 percent lift, while 12.5 impressions would have resulted in a 73 percent increase. Purchase intent -- probably the most intuitive metric for gauging ROI -- would have increased 49 percent with 3.1 impressions, and a staggering 152 percent after 12.5 impressions.
The online ad used in testing was a relatively ordinary animated skyscraper GIF. It did not use streaming video, layouts with one ad per page or the "large rectangle" format -- all of which have been proven to boost branding (see Banners Can Brand, Honestly They Can, Part II). Should the findings be indicative of real-world campaign results, it would be a major vindication for the online ad sales industry, which has undertaken a series of self-improvement, research and educational initiatives designed to persuade offline advertisers to move their budgets online.
(Source:http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/advertising/article/0,,5941_972131,00.html)
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