LOS ANGELES — Mistakes were made. But they’re fixable.
That’s the take of outspoken industry veteran and Interactive Advertising
Bureau vice chairman Richy Glassberg, who took the stand Thursday at the
@d:Tech trade show in Los Angeles to blast the industry for its
self-inflicted shortcomings.
Granted, the industry is experiencing an across-the-boards decline in ad
spending. But Glassberg, who is also founder, chairman and chief executive
of Alley-based Phase2Media, said to an audience of Web advertisers, buyers
and publishers that the interactive industry has been further hurting their
cause, by selling a medium that buyers really don’t understand in the first
place.
“The Internet is really not getting its fair share of the advertising
dollar out there. It’s hard for people to understand this medium, because it
does a little bit of what all of the other media can do,” he said. “The
Internet can do the branding and reach of television, and targeting and
information-rich format of print, the immediacy and local delivery
capabilities of radio, the precise targeting capabilities of direct mail.
… Plus it can do transactions.”
But despite the medium’s strengths, the Web advertising players have
really dropped the ball in promoting it, and in educating media planners
about how to do their jobs with interactive media, according to Glassberg.
The Web is “engaging consumers more than other media, and advertising
dollars usually follow audience, but that’s not happening in this case …
because there isn’t a commonality of research that helps agencies and
clients learn how to plan,” Glassberg said. “That’s a flaw that the industry has
not solved.”
One of the problems, he said, is that the research the industry purchases
from outside firms isn’t tailored for easy dissemination to media buyers.
“I think the third-party traffic measurement companies don’t report
metrics that are useful for advertisers,” he said. “We’re not reporting
dayparts [traffic numbers by time of day] and frequency cappers [when ads
should stop being served, to prevent overexposure]. We need to have
third-party measurement firms understanding the unique power of the medium.”
To solve this, Glassberg strikes a typically controversial position: the
industry needs a mandatory disclosure logfile audit project.
“I think it’s understandable that no one wanted to … show their
numbers. But we have to have full disclosure of our audience,” he said. “In
every other medium out there, there’s full-disclosure audited measurement.”
“I think it’s crazy that we don’t have that as an industry,” he added.
As a result of the industry not having such a project, Glassberg said Web
advertisers and publishers don’t agree on impressions, pageviews and
users — not just the numbers, but the definitions as well.
Throwing open publishers’ logfiles could help resolve those issues — as
well as help determine peak times for media planners, and for media sellers.
Once that’s accomplished, the industry can — and should — begin selling
dayparts, he said. (CBS MarketWatch is one publisher that’s started to do
this — selling IAB-sized ad bundles to Budweiser on Friday afternoons.)
But Web publishers weren’t the only ones to blame for the troubles facing
Internet advertising. Glassberg also came down hard on agency media buyers,
who should be taking a greater interest in figuring out how to better
leverage the medium.
“Agencies have to accept responsibilities, and agencies have the power to
move the medium,” he said. “There is no substitute for effective media
planning, and buys need to be tied to specific objectives. You can’t get
away with buying only portals today, it’s not going to work. You have to
train everyone better.”
Another problem, Glassberg said, is that the advertising
creative, isn’t.
“When was the last time an Internet ad made you cry, made you want the
product? Companies haven’t made outstanding online ads,” he said. “Demand
better creatives.”
Glassberg ended with an appeal to industry players to join the IAB or
other industry organizations pushing for standardization and promoting the
industry.
“I don’t see enough of the leadership in promoting the medium,” said
Glassberg. “You need to contribute case studies … join the committee
initiative and start every presentation with information about the power of
the medium. “
