Last week I joined our Finance category development manager in the UK, Tom Pearman, at the IAB's Engage for Finance conference at London's Centre Point.
The IAB hold half a dozen of these events every year and concentrate them around industry verticals. This helps drill down into specific issues and trends those categories are exposed to and lets the organisers choose highly relevant speakers to come and impart their knowledge.
In his introduction, the IAB's marketing director Kieron Matthews said that online advertising spend was still headed for 2% growth next year despite the economic downturn. He said that although all marketing channels were important, advertisers were seeing that a small shift of budget from traditional media to digital was showing disproportionate value with regards to their ROI.
Our presentation kicked off with me taking the assembled through the Search & Display Research that Nick Drew wrote about a few weeks ago.
Tom then picked up the baton and gave the audience some great insight into the different digital touch points a consumer is likely to encounter on their purchase journey.
Talking about the Engagement Mapping tool from Atlas, Tom showed how the concept enables advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns by tracking users across multiple online formats.
There’s no doubt that marketers are scrutinising their bottom line more than ever during these lean times. Although it’s not all doom and gloom for the industry as a whole, it does make sense to try and gather as much data as possible to make better decisions regarding budget allocation.
Online has always been about return on investment and it’s digging deeper into the data that will help campaign managers squeeze out every drop of profit.
So given the huge interest in the Search & Display Research, Nick has written a white paper on the subject which you can download below:
Microsoft Advertising – Search & Display Research – Better Together or from our Advertising Site
We’d love to hear some ideas from you about research projects you'd like us to undertake, so please let us know with a comment below!