Is The Pipeline Fat Enough? And We’re Not Talking About Broadband.

Facebook’s VP of Media Sales, Mike Murphy, used the guise of ‘creativity’, or lack thereof, at this year’s Sydney Ad:Tech conference to trumpet the importance of online brand advertising to generate sales over the longer term, as opposed to the immediate sales pipeline dominated by an increasingy dominant search category.

While giving credit to Google and its competency in campaign measurement, Murphy decried the potential loss of creativity in advertising which generally contributes to establishing a brand’s market reputation, in generating consumer awareness and buyer excitement. In short, it’s about recognising and quantifying how a consumer mentally registers a brand and escalates the proposition to a ‘potential buy’ over the medium term. In other words, building latency.

This is the essence of effective brand advertising – ensuring the sales pipeline is populated with potential buyers who’s intentions are weighted in that 25% to 75% band, where there is a fair-to-reasonable chance that sales will follow once the need becomes more accute, or that purchase barriers are lower.

This is a point that is not well articulated in the hysteria surrounding online brand advertising. Of course brand advertising has a critical role to play, even more so in an accountable medium like digital. Yes, immediate sales are likely (sales weighted in the 75% to 100% band), but these sales figures tend to dominate discussions (justifiably) about the returns on marketing investment dollars (ROMI).

Yet there is still extraordinary value (largely unmeasured) in this consumer ‘mid-band’ or the pipeline’s middle-ware. This is where the customer acquisition process has already started but sales qualification is generally much lower.

Murphy’s perchant for social media skews his ideal brand performance metric around ‘time online’ (eyeball minutes), while others have engagment algorithms built around frequency of exposure, offline tie-ins (call centre, shop data), depth of customer registration/profile data and the comprehensiveness (and recency) of someone’s social graph (network).

What is clear is that the value of the ‘middle-ware’ cannot be based on simplistic notions of brand recall, but on tangible evidence that when the ‘right’ consumers (those with the appropriate propensities to purchase the product at some point in the future) are exposed to brand advertising they will choose that brand over a competing item (all things being equal). Of all media, digital is best positioned to track that chain-reaction from exposure to reinforcement to inquiry to purchase intent.

The more contraversial issue is whether social media really is the appropriate context to start that chain reation, especially when the ‘exposure’ part is dependent on the accuracy of the user’s profile?