Online advertising’s pan-European secret
Opening the conference, I focussed on the new era in marketing in which brands sought ways to build time with their audiences. The new marketing landscape is one of conversations and social networks of the online environment were creating entirely new opportunities for brand engagement. Online advertising has topped 10% of adspend in the UK where it could close as high as 12% or 13% by the end of the year. Looking back at his address last year about the tipping points for digital marketing, he outlined how those tipping points had now been crossed, in Scandinavia, France, Germany and the UK. But at the same time he urged marketers to be bolder in exploring the new digital media mix. Closing words? “The changes that lie ahead for us in the next five years of marketing will dwarf those of the previous ten.”

Keynote address
Andy Hobsbawn, the chairman of Agency.com, opened the conference, talking of “a second generation of the internet when people are squarely at the centre of the story”. For Hobsbawn a new era of advertising has clearly arrived, with digital as “part of the fabric of cultural expression.” With online now woven into the fabric of our daily lives, he is clear that individuals are now active consumers of media: “the internet has turbo-charged the control consumers have,” and he went on to talk through some of the powerful social media sites and marketing tools that are now available. He also singled out innovation communities for special attention as a way of getting your lead consumers to interact with the brand.

The impact of online ad formats
Nick Tapley from OMD and Laura Chaibi from Orange talked about the differences across the European online population and the way online advertising campaigns need to celebrate the diversity of these markets. Their award-winning ‘Reconnect’ research captured the views of more than two thousand people and ran across UK, France, Germany, Spain, Netherlands and Italy. The study explored how the acceptance of different formats such as the skyscrapers and MPUs changes between countries. “As we developed the research, we discovered what became a real a wake-up call for planners and research teams” explained Tapley. Full details of the research are available from Laura Chaibi, head of media research at Orange.

Audience measurement: growing market brings new trading techniques
There is no debate about the scale of audience migration to digital media, but the lack of a single tool for measuring the reach of a website or web advertising remains a major challenge. “The measurement issues are strange because online is already more accountable than any other media channel, yet we set the bar higher all the time”, explained Bruce Hoang, IAB Europe Vice President. “Online advertising has the scope to be more precise and accurate than any other media, and underlying that is the vast amount of data the medium generates”.

But, as an industry some are frustrated because the web could do more for clients; delivering greater accuracy in planning and improving the quality of both reach and frequency data even further.

In the panel discussion it was clear that part of the problem is resistance within the mass media community to change the nature of how audiences are measured. “We have gone through an audience shift and a brand shift, but now is time for a measurement shift,” explains IAB Europe President elect Alain Heureux. “We need to measure differently and find ways to put a value behind the impact that this media space has.”

The head of the AKQA agency, Michael de Kare-Silver, is clear that there’s a need for change: “we need both a GRP measure and something that measures stickiness and the engagement between the consumer and the marketing messages.” Supported by comments from Denmark and Belgium, IAB Europe’s Bruce Hoang responded that at the next IAB Europe congress in Brussels the IAB would be leading on this.