The Planner’s Digital Dilemma: Online Research from Microsoft Advertising Institute

Research Report, 07/06/09

Existing media planning tools may help identify sites that have the highest concentration of a target audience, but digital publishers write contracts in terms of ad impressions. So brand marketers are left to guess if the plan that nets out to an $18 CPM is better or worse than the $9 CPM plan. Questions like these can’t be answered with existing planning tools because they don’t disclose how many impressions will reach a target audience, the frequency, or the cost in audience terms.

 

Attempts to solve these problems through frequency capping and profile targeting have fallen short. Although we may see a day when digital publishers have enough profile information on their audience, and a reliable method to cap frequency, to solve the planner’s dilemma, the vast majority of impressions delivered online today are neither capped nor targeted. Until that day comes, what’s required is knowledge of how the unduplicated audience grows as impressions increase for each placement in a media plan. This is not a capability in any of the digital media planning tools available today, even though it is readily available for planning traditional media. This Digital Marketing Insight presents near- and long-term solutions that let brand marketers compare the cost of impressions across channels.

 

About Microsoft Advertising Institute

Microsoft Advertising Institute publishes Digital Marketing Insights (DMIs), a series of publications by digital marketing experts that help our customers improve their digital marketing effectiveness. Many of these findings are also made available to the digital marketing industry at large. Each DMI is designed to help marketers more successfully build value with their customers, throughout the customer lifecycle: from awareness to acquisition and from retention to growth. Microsoft Advertising Institute also provides education in digital marketing to Microsoft customers. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Institute.

Download the complete Digital Marketing Insight report to learn more about research findings and key takeaways.