It’s always been intersting to me how far removed brand advertising can get from an actual purchase and how companies do, or in many cases do not, measure the performance of their brand campaigns. In a 2004 article on brand metrics by Scott Davis of Prophet consultancy, he mentions that in their surveys, only a third of companies had brand campaign performance measurement in place. Hopefully that number has improved over the last few years, but from what I can see, many brands are still only measuring the basic metrics that they used to back in the tv and billboard days, i.e conducting surveys on brand awareness, brand-recall and so on, without taking into account that on the web, the brand campaign can be much more linked to bottom-line performance (consumers purchasing the product).
Perhaps due to the tough economic situation at the moment, brand advertisers seem to be slowly catching on the performance mantra and are coming around to the idea that on the web, purchase intent is a key metric for web advertising as this interview by Daisy Whitney with Media Breaks CEO Keith Richman shows:
Obviously from our perspective, it would make a lot of sense to reduce that disconnect even further and go from seeking purchase intent to seeking an actual purchase on the spot, through the use of the NextWidgets transactional layer for brand advertising which embeds the ability to purchase goods & services right inside the banner itself, removing all of the friction between brand ad and actual purchase.
