Is Online Advertising a God send?

In the print advertising era, brand building involved publishing half page to one page ads in prominent newspapers promoting a brand. Brand building also happened through point of sale outlets – give a brand of toothpaste free to every customer who visits the outlet. Such campaigns were run on a sustained basis to impinge the brand message upon the mind of the consumer.

Such brand building campaigns were very time consuming and demanded huge advertising budgets. Campaigns were planned well, well in advance and different entities involved in the campaign would spend months in the campaign roll out.

Once the campaign was on , changes were hard to make. A media plan would be drawn up , which would involve advertising in different newspapers, magazines, etc.. Advertising space was booked and campaigns were committed to run to the plan. Such a ‘committed campaign’ could not be modified easily. It would take time for the results to be collated and analyzed. The measurement metric was complicated.

Enter online advertising.

Online advertising is similar to print advertising in a few respects. The advertising agency needed to be on board early on in the campaign, campaign details needed to be hammered out, the brand message finalized and the creatives generated. But in the most critical part of the campaign, the actual running of the campaign and measurement of performance, online leaves print advertising far behind.

Online advertising can be rolled out at 24 hours notice. Reports / Statistics – Number of impressions, number of clicks could be available from day 1 of the campaign. Number of clicks could be correlated to number of registrations/sales from day 1 of the campaign. Campaigns could be optimized through the campaign. Website-wise performance reports would help the advertiser deliver more impressions on ‘performing’ websites. And weed out non-performing ones. If there are major concerns on the campaign, it could be halted almost immediately. Results could be analyzed and the campaign re-launched with more creatives, over different inventory….

Seems like God send! The flexibility online advertising offers is unparalleled! Online offers us opportunities all the way to ensure that the campaign succeeds. Changes can be made to the campaign mix time and time again until it starts producing results. No wonder then that online advertising has taken off the way it has!