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Interact Congress - 2nd-3rd June 2010 - Barcelona

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In our last edition, more than 400 Senior marketers from all over the World gathered for two powerful days in Barcelona recognizing the role and value of Interact, the pan-European meeting place developed by IAB Europe. What makes Interact unique is the Audience as more than 25 different nationalities are represented from US to Russia Mexico or Turkey providing business and networking opportunities for all guests, is the focused Content on Digital Marketing mixing creativity, buying and selling debates throughout the European ecosystem and finally the great venues having visited Brussels-Berlin-Barcelona since 2007. 

Don’t miss our communication in September as we will be announcing the dates for our 5th edition as well as the chosen location for 2011.

Presentations from Interact 2010 can be dowloaded here

Understanding the audience unlocks the potenial for branding online

Tom Bowman, Vice President of Strategy & Operations for Global Advertising Sales at BBC Worldwide spoke to us about his views on online brand advertising. He'll be sharing them on the first panel on the main conference day, Thursday 3rd June in Barcelona. Entitled 'Opportunities and Challenges for Online Branding' and moderated by Guy Phillipson, CEO IAK UK, it is set to be a lively discussion.

Tom is a renowned digital advertising specialist, having worked for some of the biggest names in the industry over the last 12 years including MSN and Yahoo! He was one of the founding members of IAB UK when internet had a capital 'I' and there were 'digital' departments in every company. At BBC Worldwide he leads the team that advises internal clients and stakeholders on ad sales strategy across all platforms.

Branding online - the same basic tenets of marketing communications apply
Tom believes that it is crucial to create the right environment for online branding campaigns to be successful. Branding is a continuous task for marketers and the basic principles of marketing apply to campaigns online as well as offline. The brand manager of a sophisticated luxury brand for example will be looking to communicate that message online - and publishers need to be aware of this. Some websites still don't understand this and clutter their sites - big turn offs for advertisers and users alike.

Ask the audience
Publishers like BBC Worldwide are in the business of selling audience and, in order to do this effectively, they need to understand attitudes to different devices (mobile, PC, games console) and then craft the message to win attention. So Tom believes that successful online brand campaigns, as in every other medium, rely on understanding the audience and matching the advertiser, the brand and the message to it.

Behavioural targeting - Beautiful for Branding
Tom believes there's a strong future for behavioural and contextual targeting in this world and that is good for brands online. Combined with a deep understanding of your audience, behavioural targeting is the "super charger" to any online brand campaign. In fact, he concludes "It's beautiful for branding."

Anheuser-Busch InBev – making the digital connection

Jef Vandecruys, Global Project Leader Digital Connection, Anheuser-Busch InBev was the first speaker on day two of the Congress. We caught up with him to get a sense of the topics he'll be addressing on June 3rd in Barcelona.

Jef's passion is encouraging everyone across the digital value chain to work together more effectively – a sentiment very close to IAB Europe's heart. Having worked in a global procurement role for the world's biggest brewer that owns brands including Budweiser, Stella and Becks, he understands how advertisers, their agencies and media owners can collaborate to produce stunning results.

Jef believes "Digital advertising is capable of delivering not double, but triple digit growth if everyone can play their role to the best of their ability." He is excited to participate in the Congress because the speakers, delegates and sponsors represent the entire digital industry, including legislators, research agencies and technology companies and each and everyone has their part to play in delivering effective branding campaigns online. "In particular as an industry, we need to agree on our Key Performance Indicators, and to find a standardised way to measure online branding" he says. So we expect that later in the day Jef will be listening to our panel debate covering this very topic 'The proof for branding online: How are we measuring it? What are we measuring?' with panellists from comScore, Microsoft Advertising, Gemius, Mindshare and EyeWonder.

As part of his session, Jef will be sharing a current and very topical campaign with the delegates. Football fans might be able to guess what that might be....

Microsoft on Mission for more brand campaigns online 

Laurent Delaporte, VP of Microsoft Advertising, EMEA is tasked with growing digital advertising revenue across the company’s extensive advertising portfolio. Sneak Preview spoke to Laurent about his session at Congress and his views on branding online.

Laurent is passionate about the role digital can play in building brands. He tells Sneak Preview that online has a huge advantage over some traditional media in that it can drive sales and build brands simultaneously. He goes on to say that whilst sales oriented search and direct response activity will never be totally superseded by brand building online, there will inevitably be a greater balance between the budgets allocated to each in the future. Today there’s a disconnect between the percentage of ad budgets allocated to online marketing campaigns and the levels of consumers’ online use. The mission – one that is totally possible and down to the digital industry to embrace - is to understand how to combine digital in the ad mix in the most appropriate way for each brand. To do this effectively, you need reliable metrics.

Microsoft Advertising recently conducted research “Dwell on Branding” which introduces the concept of dwell score as a more effective measure for online brand campaigns, challenging traditional online measurement, such as CTRs and impressions. Dwell is about how consumers connect and engage with a brand. It is the difference between a simple ‘click’ and a meaningful brand interaction. The crux of how we get online branding higher up the agenda is by proving its value. As more and more campaigns are measured using dwell score, benchmarks can be developed as well as guidelines on formats, creative and planning to ensure the most effective online brand campaigns.

In spite of this, Laurent believes brands cannot afford to ignore traditional media. He says effective branding campaigns still need to be balanced and planned across a range of media. We’re living in a much more media connected, media integrated world and yet some advertisers are still continuing to under-utilize online as an opportunity for brand building.

Where does this leave us? Consumer engagement and interaction are the buzz words for the future. If we can get the industry to adopt the dwell score, more advertisers will see the true contribution online can make for brand building and brand engagement. I’m really looking forward to discussing this with the industry at the Interact Congress on 3rd June.

When excellent online customer experience delivers the brand promise  

Sarajit Mitra, Global Head of Marketing and Customer Experience for HSBC Global Banking and Markets brought a B2B perspective to the online branding debate on 3rd June. Having gained significant knowledge of customer experience throughout his career, Sarajit now has responsibility for positioning and differentiating HSBC amongst his target market of corporate and institutional clients.

Three is the magic number
There are three major areas Sarajit addressed in his keynote session after lunch. Firstly, how does HSBC promote its business online and build a brand presence? Secondly, how does the brand engagement happen as customers transact online, and thirdly and crucially for everyone managing a B2B brand, how do you deliver a great customer experience online?

For Sarajit's target market, brand promotion is targeted to media including third party transaction and knowledge platforms, the business TV channels and in-flight advertisements that reach corporate audiences.

Sarajit tells Sneak Preview that customer experience is critical in the B2B world and that as so much customer interaction now occurs online, getting it right is very important. Service becomes a real competitive advantage and every function in the internal chain becomes part of the brand delivery.

Finally the online environment delivers an enormous of insight into what customers are doing, when, how often, for how much. This insight is central for the development and delivery of the service the bank offers. As Sarajit says "As market needs change, our service and offer must adapt. It is a constant process of evolution; and it is this that keeps HSBC competitive."

It’s time to give the click the flick

Gian Fulgoni, Chairman and Co-Founder of comScore kick started the third panel session of Day 2 entitled 'The proof for branding online: How are we measuring it? What are we measuring?' using data unique to the Interact Congress to show where branding online can be effective.

The traditional rules still apply
comScore's extensive work in this area, both in the US and, more recently, in Europe shows that online advertising has a latent effect - just like traditional advertising, so it is important to measure people's response over time to see just how they respond based on how many ad impressions they receive.

comScore measured the lift in visits to the website of the advertised brand during an online campaign tracked over a four week period. What this showed is the uplift in visits is gradual and cumulative – and therefore "the click is the last thing an advertiser should be using to measure advertising effectiveness. In fact there is no relationship between click rates and ad effectiveness."

Gian will also share a comparison of campaigns using only display, and those using video to show the huge impact video can make to campaign effectiveness - in one case uplifts of up to 180%. comScore research has also shown that consumers’ response to display ads grows with an increase in the number of ad impressions. "The implication is that websites are running too many display ads on a page and people don't notice them through the clutter. For advertisers this means choosing sites where a display ad is prominent to make the maximum impact" he concludes.

With such a strong starting point, you can look forward to a lively debate with the other panellists from Microsoft Advertising, Mindshare, Gemius and EyeWonder.

Digital Darwinism: Where the good advertising ideas survive, and the bad ones become extinct

With his brief for innovation and experimentation, Darin Brown, President of Global Accounts, Razorfish was the perfect speaker to share his views on how to reinvent the ad agency model for the digital age. At the award winning agency Darin has managed key client relationships including Levis, McDonald's, Microsoft and Unilever and has been instrumental in driving the company's growth strategy in Europe.

Advertising agencies and their clients have become used to working in an environment where it takes months to hone a message that encapsulates the brand; and then research and test it extensively before investing millions in creative and media. But Darin will argue during his keynote presentation at the Interact Congress that this model is gone forever. "We've moved into an age of 'brand fan management' when consumers become fans of brands and want programming that we need to feed them on an on-going basis. The role for ad agencies in this world is to amplify the messages they like and broadcast them to brand fans using all the digital tools available to us."

Darin believes that the last time the advertising agency business model innovated was in the 1960's; 50 years on and digital is now the driving force behind a much needed reinvention. 'Digital Darwinism' exists because in the digital world executions can be realised rapidly, creative executions can be done much more cheaply and the media may even be free; if a campaign doesn't deliver it can be 'killed;' if it succeeds, it can get a life of its own, spread virally by consumers; and anything that doesn't hit the mark can be evolved by the agency in response to feedback that brand fans are dying to share. In this brave new world of advertising we must listen to the consumer, not just push perfectly formed messages at them.

Presentations from Interact 2010 can be dowloaded here