Search or Display? Mobile or PC? All of the Above

Agency professional talks about finding the right mix in advertising

Kazi Ahmed, Account Director at Media Contacts, recently talked with Yahoo! about trends agencies are experiencing in the digital advertising space.  Keep reading for his perspective on topics such as the shift from offline to online advertising, mobile advertising trends, and innovative targeting ideas.  Media Contacts is an interactive arm of Havas Digital.

How do you and Media Contacts/MPG view the much debated relationship on overall campaign performance between search and display? From your perspective, how important is upper funnel activity to driving these online or offline conversions?

Our clients are sold on the idea that search generates results, no question. Where we struggle a bit is getting clients to understand that much of that performance is often being driven with the help of a display campaign. In other words, you need to fill the top of the funnel to ensure that a steady stream of conversions are driven via search at the bottom of the funnel.

We’ve spent a lot of time educating our clients on this premise–through much of the research on the search/display relationship that is being published by the Yahoos and Googles of the world. Additionally, we rely on attribution reports, and mapping the relationship between display and search metrics to make the case.

At the end of the day, the question isn’t “should we do search or display?,” but “what is the right balance of search and display for my campaign?” This is where we (the agency) need to drive the recommendation.

Where do you think mobile is going in the next couple of years? Do you think that everyone will eventually have a Smartphone, and that advertising on the handset will be as ubiquitous as it is on the PC?

Mobile has been a little bit of an agency inside joke in that it has been the emerging medium…for the past five years. I do think that things have started to drastically change. Thanks in large part to the iPhone, hardware capability is finally getting to where it needs to be for consumers to have a higher comfort level with mobile web. Also, there are a bunch of amazing developers out there who are putting out slick applications, which is helping more and more users get used to the idea of doing all sorts of stuff on their handheld devices. Finally, U.S. carriers are starting to play nice in the sandbox.

All of these have helped mobile become a truly ripe marketplace. Mobile demand is starting to finally meet the supply. From a consumer perspective, the next frontier will be for users to get more comfortable with transacting via mobile. We’ve already tackled that hurdle on the PC, so I don’t see this being a major barrier.

How are you, from an agency perspective, seeing the marketing mix shift from offline to online? Is there anything more that publishers can do to facilitate this shift?

Many of our clients are closely tracking media ROI across channels. When you compare it to other marketing channels, digital is consistently the top performer, so the hard work has already been done for us (i.e., we don’t have to prove that digital “works”).

I think the best way that publishers like Yahoo! can help is to share the massive amounts of data that you have on consumers. That is one thing that agencies generally do not have direct access to. If we can find an efficient way to share this data, it will make it easier to find even more qualified consumers and further prove the efficiency that the digital channel can deliver.

If there were one type of display targeting that you would like to see that has not yet been invented, what would it look like?

Wow, that’s a great question. You know, I really believe that we’ve already uncovered many effective targeting strategies, be it BT, contextual, advertiser leadback, search leadback and so on. What I’d like to get a better sense of is potential value, based on the order of these behaviors.

For example, User A and User B may have displayed the exact same “online behaviors,” but in completely different orders. Both users may have visited my client’s website three times in the last two days, clicked on relevant banner advertising, and typed in relevant search queries. While both users may be classified as having the same behaviors, User B’s potential value may be higher because the last two activities he/she performed was a visit to the widget product page on my client’s website, followed by a search for “free shipping on widgets” on Yahoo!. I know that Yahoo! dabbled with this a little bit with the Shoppers vs. Engagers segments that were introduced a few years back, but I definitely think there is more to be learned on the targeting front.