Richard Eyre's Keynote Speech at AOP conference

I was at the Association of Online Publishers’ (AOP) conference yesterday and heard the keynote speech from Richard Eyre, Chairman of the IAB Leadership Council. His remit is to build online’s share of total advertising spend. He is well qualified to do so having achieved a similar task for radio. However, some of his key points gave me cause for concern.

Firstly, Mr Eyre strongly urged the online advertising industry to have a single voice if it was to succeed in winning a greater share of advertisers’ budgets. I certainly agree that ‘unanimity of voice’ is important in this respect but I wouldn’t go as far as Mr Eyre then did in suggesting (unless I misunderstood him) that the IAB and AOP should merge into one. The AOP is for online publishers and there is a world of issues to address there which have nothing to do with advertising. We’re an online publisher and we don’t carry adverts at all but we’re very interested in how the AOP could help us understand the dynamics of charging for content online.

Secondly, Mr Eyre urged those in the online advertising industry not to compete with each other but to compete with the real competition in the form of other media channels. Again, I certainly agree that in-fighting among online media owners is not helpful. However, I’m concerned with his ‘us’ and ‘them’ approach to the media channels. Everything we’ve learned from all the people we’ve talked to across many sectors suggests that ‘integration’ and ‘online-as-part-of-the-marketing-mix’ are the way forwards. And I agree. Surely the way to increase online ad spend is to point out how it fits with other forms of marketing and ad spend – it’s just that at the moment it is getting too small a share of that mix in terms of spend.

Thirdly, Mr Eyre urged media owners to speak to advertisers and media buyers not in internet geek speak (‘unique users’ etc.) but in the language they understand – frequency, reach, capping, awareness. I entirely agree that if this is what it takes to get in the door, to get a dialogue going and to make that first sale, then so be it. However, I sincerely hope this is a short term stealth strategy to then opening the eyes of those advertisers to what online can really do for them which is much more about engagement and building more valuable relationships with more valuable customers.

If the truth be told I don’t believe the internet is that great an ‘advertising’ channel in a “mass / push / broadcast” sense. Certainly no worse than any other, but its real power is as a permission marketing and relationship building medium. Online advertising needs to become much more about positioning a brand in such a way that users want to engage and interact with it. This has been said a million times already and things are changing but boy are advertisers taking a long time to get it! Frequency and capping are great but I’d really like to know more about levels of engagement; Reach is great but quality of reach is even better; Awareness and propensity are great but money in the bank and ROI is even better.

I applaud what the IAB are doing and Mr Eyre is no doubt right to be taking on the advertisers on their own terms. But it’s a shame that after all this time advertisers, or the media buyers and agencies, are taking forever to realise the real power of online. My hope, and we’re beginning to see it happen, is that the Marketing Directors of the really big advertisers get it – the agencies will of course then follow. Indeed, it was a shame there weren’t more of those Marketing Directors at the conference.