The Concept of Brand Premium in Online Advertising
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Online advertising is an enigmatic subject. The nature of the Internet provides for better targeting of a company, compared to other mediums, except maybe for mobile advertising. It also gives a better advertising management system where every decision of advertising and its content is measurable.
Having said that, it seems the outlook towards spending on digital advertising and new media is still shrouded in skepticism, especially in India. We can tell from our own experience of how some people are spending lakhs every day advertising on television and papers, while thinking a few times about spending a good 1/10th of that on social media. And this is where the enigma lies.
However, this post is not another rant on how corporates should take the Internet seriously or how they should increase their ad spends so that I can buy a car. Instead it is to explain the concept of building a brand through online advertising and how it has long term benefits beyond the campaign. In fact, I would like to take it a step ahead and discuss a concept that I have, in mind, about the brand premium of the medium of advertising.
What is Brand Premium of The Medium?
In reality, it is just a jazzed up word that I made up right now and very simple to understand. It is basically the added value a medium brings to your brand because of it’s own brand attributes. In this case, the media, instead of being a generic identifier like print media or mobile or web, gets in to the specifics. So, in terms of online advertising, it is the particular site that is being targeted.
This can be understood easily when compared to a newspaper. Advertising in a newspaper depends on two things - the section and the size. A half page, page 3 ad might cost a lot more than a 15 x 15 classified box with hundreds of other classifieds. It has a 3 way effect on your business:
- Better visibility and no competition for eye-balls
- Better brand recognition
- Better sales because of the above two reasons
For these reasons, you pay a higher price for the added value that you see. This is exactly the concept of premium for the medium.
So when you advertise online, there are two ways to go about it. Either advertise on a popular site filled with as much advertisers as much as the content it has, fighting for its readers eyeballs and clicks. Or, go for an exclusive tie up with popular niche site and leverage on its brand as a quality sponsor.
The latter will cost a lot more than regular advertising, but its effect steamrolls into the future. To my mind, it is the price you pay to create evangelists out of your target audience, and that has a huge impact on your ROI on ad spends albeit not visible or perfectly measurable.
How Does Brand Benefits Push up my ROI?
Consider a scenario where, you are the only advertise on a particular website. Suddenly it opens up a lot of possibilities for your reach. What earlier used to be just banners pasted on the website, can now move on to something more convertible - targeted email activity. Any publisher would be willing to send a personalised email message from the sponsor (yes that would be you) once in a while, because importantly it is just “a” personal message. This is a luxury he can’t really afford without pissing off his subscribers if he has 10 advertisers.
You can talk with the publisher in tailoring his content suitable to your brand without affecting the quality of his content or any moral issues, because your product or service is useful to his readers (remember I said niche). The possibilities are actually endless.
In fact this is where readers start to become evangelists. They come to the site for some information, soak in the content which is very well entrenched in your brand matters. This information is then propagated by them, thereby delivering what is essentially your message beyond the reach of the website. They might use any social media to do this, maybe blog about it, write on their forum or mention it in a community group on a social network they are part of. In essence this aspect relates to conversational marketing ..which goes beyond social media marketing.
What we see here is a picture where advertising is moving beyond awareness, it is becoming a tool for information. And when it becomes a tool for information you are essentially reducing your costs in the future because others are sharing YOU ..that is what people do with information ..they share it.
It is this aspect that takes shape in the form of brand premium. The problem with this concept is that it doesn’t usually deliver immediate results. And once you create evangelists it is difficult to measure each individuals effect on both the brand and numbers. Nevertheless, the fact that they have an impact cannot be disregarded. And therein lies the reason why you should move on to premium advertising in your web advertising efforts.
Shayon adds - Yes, social media marketing is hitting the mainstream big time. We already know that MTV Roadies had long been associated with social media and now has also been forming tie ups with Orkut, the biggest social networking site in India. We had also reported Opera creating a storm by demanding to merge Opera Mini fan pages with its “official” version. These little facts go a long way to prove the faith that brands have been showing towards social media optimization and how fast is this medium actually gettingon par withtraditional brand image development procedures.
Image Courtesy : Compassion in Politics
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Its great blog! I would appreciate if you can list some of the premium branding strategies at online market space?
Also if one brand is already popular at offline (physical market) what would be e marketing channels to promote it at online?