TORONTO – Advertisers in the digital space need to be “pinball wizards” to keep consumers engaged with their brands or risk losing them as potential customers, says Shelagh Stoneham, senior vice-president and general manager of brands and marketing communications for Rogers Communications.
Stoneham was one of five panellists who took part in a discussion about digital advertising strategies at the Digital Media Summit being held in Toronto this week as part of Canadian Music Week. She asked the audience to visualize a marketer’s advertising message as a pinball ricocheting off different bumpers as it descends down the pinball machine. “The ball drops, you have a message that you need to communicate… and each bumper represents a communication point with your target,” Stoneham said. “Every time you have an opportunity to either further engage the consumer and pull them down through the game or to lose them.”
She said she thinks of digital advertising as a pinball game because “you don’t know where the consumer is going to go. They may go to the Internet 10 times before they even visit a store.” Stoneham said the challenge for advertisers today is to decide which combination of media vehicles to leverage for each campaign, now that there is a greater number of options by which to communicate with consumers.
“What’s timeless is that campaigns have to achieve a strong ROI. The other thing that’s been timeless is that budgets really haven’t increased a lot over the years,” Stoneham said. She added that her company typically spends over 20% of its advertising budget on digital media buys.
Kobi Gulersen, director of digital marketing for MasterCard Canada, said digital ad spending may account for 20% to 30% of some of his company’s ad campaigns, but in other cases it may be almost 90% of a program budget. He explained decisions about where to spend advertising money are usually based on trackable results and not just on reports about ad impressions. “A lot of what we spend time and money on is looking at direct response and particular tactics that drive results that we can as closely as possible directly attribute to the objective of the program,” Gulersen said.
Jennifer Bergen, general manager of digital for Astral Media, agreed that advertising clients are looking for measurable return on investment from their media buy. “With our clients, when they’re advertising with us, more and more it’s less about impressions,” Bergen said. “It’s really about ROI in terms of: ‘Did I push any product? Did I see more traffic?’”
Bergen added that Astral Radio implemented an ROI program not too long ago that uses a database of about 10 years’ worth of marketing data to analyze different media mixes to see which one “moved the needle” for different ad campaigns.
The National Hockey League launched its first website about 10 years ago, and since that time has been evolving the online experience for hockey fans, said Karen Gordon, the NHL’s director of online sales, another panelist. “As a league, we absolutely want to be where consumers are engaging in hockey,” Gordon said. “We’ve been coming up with more and more digital products for them to access hockey, all the way to our latest games on our app, where consumers can pay to watch games.
“We wanted to be where consumers are demanding the game to be available. And marketers are following that, but admittedly not to the same extent consumers are spending the time,” Gordon said.
She added that many hockey fans are interested in the lifestyles and off-the-ice activities of the players, which is leading to new branded content opportunities. One example is the NHL’s partnership with L’Oréal to create a “red carpet experience” around its NHL Awards show, Gordon said.
For AOL, and in particular its Huffington Post digital media site, the objective is about “creating a wonderful environment where consumers, content producers and brands really all interact together,” said Leanne Gibson, director of ad products and business operations for AOL Canada. “When the message is relevant, when it’s easy to consume, when it complements content, you’re going to attract and get a user to engage,” Gibson said.
Returning to the issue of keeping consumers engaged with a company’s brand, Rogers’ Stoneham added that the real-time aspect of digital media allows advertisers to change course quickly if a digital ad campaign is not working. “Instead of a rear-view mirror, after a campaign is over… it’s a real-time view,” Stoneham said. “So if you made a mistake and you’re not getting the time spent or the eyeballs that you had hoped to get, you can do something about it very, very quickly. There’s an opportunity to course-correct in real-time.”
