Real Media Offers Brand Awareness Reporting

Addressing an industry need to measure brand impact in online advertising, ad network and marketing firm Real Media unveiled a tool that it said would add “brand awareness” to important metrics, such as impressions and clickthroughs, reported to advertisers.

Created in conjunction with market researches Taylor Nelson Sofres Interactive — a sister company of Competitive Media Reporting — Real Media’s “Ad Insight” tool essentially functions like an online survey, popping up when the user leaves a Web site to ask users about brand awareness and how they perceived ads on the site.

The answers are then compared to a control group, which did not see the ads, and results — increased brand and ad awareness, impact on action, brand perception, ad creativity, audience targeting and marketing mix — are reported to clients.

The approach is similar to that taken by New York-based start-up Dynamic Logic, which has been working to gain a foothold in the arena with its AdIndex product.

Spokespeople from Real Media said its new product would provide a greater understanding of online ad effectiveness and target audiences — useful information at a time when the importance of variou metrics are changing.

“Real Media understands that click-through is no longer an appropriate metric for measuring brand-oriented ads,” said Gabriel Hughes, a research analyst at New York-based Real Media. “The Ad Insight tool has been developed in response to this current marketplace realization and helps to address the client needs for a greater understanding of brand impact.”

Already, the firm said it’s seeing results that support online advertising as a branding medium — just what online marketers want to hear.

In one study of a business services firm, Real Media said Ad Insight found that brand awareness scored at 44 percent for those who had seen the ad, versus just 30 percent for those who had not seen it.

“We have addressed the needs of the online advertising community and in our preliminary applications of this new tool, we have already seen results which clearly demonstrate the brand impact of online advertising as measured uniquely by Ad Insight,” Hughes said.