At Advertising Week, the Vital Role of Digital Marketing

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Wednesday, October 03, 2012

At Advertising Week, the Vital Role of Digital Marketing

By TANZINA VEGA and STUART ELLIOTT

THE fundamental things apply as time goes by, according to the song. So, too, with each year that goes by, Advertising Week in New York becomes more fundamentally about digital, mobile and social media, underscoring how they have become fundamental ways of selling goods and services.

That can be divined from the schedule for the 2012 Advertising Week, which began on Monday and continues through Friday. Scores of the more than 150 panels, speeches and presentations are devoted to newer marketing methods, with companies like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Twitter being discussed about as often as parodies of “Call Me Maybe” are uploaded to YouTube.

And there are numerous daylong or multiday events focusing on digital, mobile and social, among them O.M.M.A. (Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) Global, sponsored by MediaPost Communications and composed of five conferences in areas like mobile, video and social media; SM2 2012, the Smarter Mobile Marketing conference, sponsored by the Mobile Marketing Association; the Mobile Media Summit 2012; and the Mixx Conference and Expo, sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Facebook took the opportunity of a session at the Mixx conference to answer questions about the efficacy of buying advertising on its site — questions that were widespread even before the company’s disappointing initial public offering.

Brad Smallwood, director of pricing and measurement at Facebook, discussed the findings of a study the company hoped would change advertisers’ minds about depending on measurements like clicks to determine the success of campaigns on facebook.com. The goal is to have them perceive the social network more as a medium akin to television for branded advertising

“If you ran a campaign in the last five years, you focused on clicks,” Mr. Smallwood said, but “demand fulfillment is only one piece of the marketing puzzle.”

“We have to provide a solution for the brand marketers of the world,” he added.

The study was conducted with a new Facebook partner, Datalogix, a company that measures in-store purchases. Fifty campaigns on Facebook were measured, for brands from giant marketers like Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. When purchase data from stores was combined with data about ad impressions on Facebook, the study found that 70 percent of the campaigns enjoyed three times greater return on their budgets, and 99 percent of the sales came from consumers who did not interact with the Facebook ads.

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