- Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK As more brands look to plow into advertising, the question remains: What is the value of campaigns that often reach comparatively small numbers of people by accepted online measurement techniques.
 
A new industry group, the Social Media Ad Council, is forming to establish guidelines for engagement-oriented advertising, including a common way of describing and measuring campaigns beyond simply impressions and clicks.
 
SMAC has attracted several agency executives, including Havas Digital CEO Don Eppersen, Universal McCann global managing partner Stuart Bogaty, Digitas media director Chris Paul and MediaVest group director James Kiernan. Others involved are Quantcast vp of media research T.S. Kelly, Davie Brown president Tom Meyer, Gartner analyst Allen Weiner and Edelman Digital svp Jackie Price.
 
"I think we have all recognized that creating engagement in the social media space is different from traditional brand advertising," said Tom Gerace, CEO of social networking site Gather, who organized the group. "You can do traditional brand advertising on social media sites. We have ways to measure and buy it. But engagement campaigns are really creating conversations and awareness at a much different level than display advertising. We don't have standard ways to buy that, uniform ways to measure it and a common vocabulary around it."
 
Gerace cited a recent campaign run by a consumer products maker that had 20 Gather members test and write about a product, along with another 40 who did so on their own. The campaign led to 600 conversations about the product, according to Gerace. That seems like a small number until you factor in 720,000 exposures to the conversation in friend feeds, he said.
 
"We don't have any way to describe that cascade and quantify it," Gerace said.
 
Absent from SMAC: Facebook and MySpace. Gerace said both were invited, and he hopes they will join. The key was to begin with strong agency-side representation, since they are the ones who decide where the money goes.
 
"We've been through the early chaos and experimentation," he said. "Now we're getting down to business."
 
SMAC plans to meet quarterly in New York, along with bimonthly conference calls. Gerace has contacted the Interactive Advertising Bureau to participate, but believes a smaller group with heavy agency representation can create ideas more quickly.
 
"[Agencies] have to buy into how we're thinking about it and measuring it," he said. "It's the buy side that will give it a stamp of validity."