Research firm Information Resources Inc. has introduced a new platform for measuring the effectiveness of online advertising against offline sales. The move comes as packaged goods marketers spend more ad dollars on the Web, but keep a close check on ROI.
The service, announced today (Wednesday), was created in collaboration with research companies comScore, Dynamic Logic, and [x+1], a digital marketing solutions provider. It allows companies in the CPG, retail and healthcare space to measure the effectiveness of online ad campaigns among shoppers most likely to buy their products.
ComScore and Dynamic Logic both offer proprietary methods for tracking and improving the effectiveness of online ad campaigns. But IRI claims its service is different because the collected data spans across the Internet, enabling companies to analyze online consumer behavior and exposure to ads across multiple sites.
For instance, a marketer could run a targeted campaign across sites like ESPN.com, Martha Stewart.com and on The Food Network, but still reap ROI stats across all of these properties, explained [x+1] CEO John Nardone. (His firm’s product, CPG Connect, is the tool that allows IRI to create consumer profiles and collect an ROI assessment.)
Similar attempts have been made before. In 2003, Yahoo teamed up with Nielsen’s (then known as VNU) ACNielsen division to launch Consumer Direct. The goal was essentially the same: Analyze the shopping and purchase behaviors of more than 15,000 consumers taken from ACNielsen's Homescan panel, and then find out how online advertising stacked up against in-store sales. The service attracted advertisers like Unilever, Kraft Foods and Pepsi—all of whom participated in the project’s beta stages. The platform, however, was specific to Yahoo only.
IRI’s digital media solutions suite, which doesn’t have a formal name, is the latest extension of that. And with packaged goods marketers investing more money in Internet advertising, the industry has moved beyond “accounting and proof” to wanting to know the “how’s and why’s” of why a particular online or social media campaign worked, or didn’t, said Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s svp of custom solutions and a former co-developer on the 2003 Yahoo-ACNielsen project.
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