As head of a leading digital advertising agency here, my job requires that I keep an eye on what my competitors are doing.  Furthermore, I also have to provide advice on what creatives work, and which do not.

I often look back at the good example by Richard Burrage, Managing Director of Cimigo, a leading market research company here in Vietnam.  Besides extolling the virtues of good data, he also analyzes actively the results of various TVC campaigns, and tries to provide best creative practices to the ATL advertising community here.

For me, I’m trying to do something similar with online campaigns.

Take this banner from leading (#2 or #3 in Vietnam) mobile telecom provider Vinaphone.  This is a typical creative in Vietnam, neither exceptionally good or exceptionally poor.

It is however a great example of how people ignore design with online banners.  There are three different images/logs, equally sized in this banner along with a message.  When a designer presents a banner like this to me, I have but to ask: Who is the hero?

The hero to me, is the focal point of a creative.  It is normally either the product or the consumer, and illustrates how our lives, the consumers’ lives, are improved by the company/brand/stuff being sold.  It is that simple.

In this banner though, we see three images, only one of which relates to the service being sold.  The message is explicit, and written in the banner.  (Oh, I wish it was a catchy strapline!)

At the end of the day, this creative is an example of lazy design.  Slap a couple logos together, get a copywriter (or don’t get a copywriter) to “tell” instead of “show” and call it a day.  I’m not sure who is at fault for this banner, the agency or the advertiser, but at the end of the day, they both should be ashamed for letting this come to light.

Advertising is more of an art than a science. And even though you can measure everything online, it is very difficult to measure the success of an online ad campaign.  Even though it is difficult, this does not mean you should not try.  The challenge with online, is that there are enough variables and information available, that marketers hold online marketing channels to a higher standard than traditional media.

For example, print media’s KPI is normally measured by two numbers, circulation and readership.  Television is defined by the number of rating points a show has.  Internet has available anywhere from 3 to 30 different statistics available.

There’s no precise way to measure the success of an ad campaign. For a lot of brands, you cannot determine how much revenue is generated b each advertising dollar spent.  However, there are certain ways for you to measure and determine your campaign’s success.

At New Media Edge, we believe that each campaign should have its own singular goal.  Make sure you have clear advertising goals.  Having one clear goal allows you to focus your media plan and more importantly identify the KPIs that are important to your campaign.

Sample campaign goals may include:

Fundamentally, in online advertising and in may other facets of life, I believe “Simple, done well, wins.”

There is an elegance and a strength in having a singular purpose, a simple campaign mechanic and a simple report.

This singular campaign lets you select specific online channels.  There are more online channels than most people imagine, and the most common ones are:

• Display media
• Organic Search
• Paid Search
• Forum Seeding
• Social applications
• Branded content
• EDM (Electronic Direct Mail)
• Digital PR

And for each channel, there are specific KPIs for them.  For example:

• Display media (Impressions, Click Through Rate, CTR)
• Organic Search (Search Engine Rank Position, SERP, organic search traffic and volume)
• Paid Search (Cost per Click, CPC)
• Forum Seeding (Views, members, posts and replies)
• Social applications (installations, monthly users)
• Branded content (direct traffic, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rate)
• EDM (Electronic Direct Mail)
• Digital PR (views, clicks)

It can be quite dizzying, the number of metrics available online.  The only way to navigate this treacherous maze of metrics is to stay focused on the campaign objective.  Being clear on the campaign objective will allow you to read the correct report and track the correct KPI.

For simple branding campaigns, your key KPI will be impressions, reach and frequency.  Impressions are the number of times that someone sees the ad.  For branding though, the most important campaign metric is reach and frequency.  Reach is the number of people that have seen a display ad, and frequency is the number of times someone has seen an ad.

The media plan and ad spots for a branding campaign have unique qualities, different from other ad spots.  They need to be large, at the top of the page.  Large enough so they dominate the page, almost edging out the content itself.  In the US and the UK, where advertising budgets are big, publishers normally have 1-3 ad units per page.  Contrast this to Vietnam’s top publisher Vietnam Express has almost 20 adspots on its homepage.  Certainly, a VNExpress impression is not the same as a US ad spot.  Clutter and ad position both are important factors in media planning.

Once you have determined a single campaign goal and the correct metric, you need to setup the correct analytic tools to measure your KPIs.  Adserving (from technology providers like Eyeblaster and DoubleClick) was developed to provide a fair ruler to measure the effectiveness of banners.  Both Eyeblaster, DoubleClick and OpenX (their open source cousin) have some click fraud detection built in, though for performance campaigns where clicks are important, it is best to use a dedicated click fraud testing tool (like ClickForensics).

So, how does one measure campaign success?  Most people ask me for shortcuts.  ”What is the one number that tells me I was successful?” they ask.  I always have to shrug and remind them my process of building and managing campaigns.  Once you follow the process, you will know which channel to run your campaign on, and hopefully, the applicable KPI.

1. Determine your campaign objective and target audience.
2. Choose the appropriate online media channels to engage your target audience and deliver your campaign objective.
3. Your online channel and your campaign objective will combine to determine your online KPI.

I realized this morning that much of online advertising in Vietnam is game design.  Somehow, the digital channel has become a channel where advertisers and marketers trick their consumers into playing games in “branded experiences.”  The naive thinking is that the more times consumers are forced to see a company logo, this reinforcement will automatically translate into sales.  These games rarely (if ever) delve into the actual benefits of the product.

See Adage and Bannerblog’s Six Foundations of Great Creative

And to be honest, most product benefits can be explained through a story.  Games do have their place in advertising.  However, the best campaigns in the world are not games.  They are creatives that educate or entertain the consumer.  And yes, you can entertain a consumer without resorting to a game.  See for instance – viral videos.