Friday 2 November 2007

Marketing Week thought piece: "When it comes to digital the keyword is still "integration"


This was a thought piece for Marketing Week that discussed the importance of offline media in generating sales that are converted through brand keywords. The problem for the industry has been the "last click wins" model of search doesn't account for other on and offline activity that pushed the consumer to that final search for a specific brand name. In fact the issue isn't unique to search. The whole direct response analysis system as it was from the old day before online is also suffering from the now outdated concept that a key code or unique telephone number can sufficiently assign the correct acclaim to the media that caused the "direct response". To that end I have been a staunch advocate of econometric modelling. Sometimes the cost of the work isn't cheap but to me it's an essential part of any marketing budget.
As far as this article was concerned, I think it's a very welcome development that companies such as Atlas and Dart are looking at variations on exposures to conversion tracking. Hopefully this means that in six months times we can be talking about very different observations about the relationship between brand and generic keywords, display and search and good old online and offline