Amy Fuller, MasterCard Worldwide

A N   I N T E R V I E W  W I T H :

Amy Fuller

Group Executive, Worldwide Consumer Marketing/Global Products & Solutions

MasterCard Worldwide

Amy Fuller is responsible for managing MasterCard’s brand marketing programs globally, including the company’s long-running “Priceless” advertising campaign. She also leads MasterCard’s global sponsorship strategy, consumer promotions, media advertising investment strategy and agency operations management.

Before joining MasterCard, Ms. Fuller served as senior partner at Y&R Brands on the AT&T account and held executive positions throughout Y&R Advertising during her decade-long tenure there. She also worked in business development at The Lord Group, a Y&R company, and Ogilvy & Mather on the Siemens Corp. and Kraft Foods accounts.

Ms. Fuller chairs the Integrated Marketing Committee for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and is a member of its Agency Relations Committee. She is also a member of the National Advertising Review Board.

In this interview, she discusses the challenge of defining and understanding online engagement and discusses the question marketers in multiple categories want answered: What role does online engagement play in contributing to brand health?

eMarketer: What are the most effective methods of measuring the impact of online media on your brand?

Amy Fuller: We are in the process of trying to figure out the most effective way of attributing shifts in brand health to online activity. The easier part of the equation is measuring engagement—although I would say that’s still a relatively new field of measurement. The question is, how do you get more sophisticated about measuring the quality and impact of brand engagement?

eMarketer: What do you consider engagement?

Ms. Fuller: We have a strange business model. For us, engagement can be as simple as a qualified target audience member spending time with the MasterCard brand, or it can be as detailed as helping to drive e-commerce and/or acquisition activities online. But we are an ingredient brand and so that puts us at the center of a brand decision.

We don’t control a lot of the levers of how consumers behave. But we’re a brand franchiser, which means the quality of our brand is part of our core business offering. We do need to get to a place where we’re comfortable with how we understand the impact of brand engagement on things like brand opinion.

eMarketer: Where would you say MasterCard currently is in this process?

Ms. Fuller: Probably the crudest way we can look at it is to look at the opinion or state of our brand health among people who have spent time on our Website versus those who haven’t.

Among the population that has spent time on our Website, we see that we’re a healthier brand. But it’s a chicken-and-egg question, because did you come to the Website because you were already a fan of the brand and wanted to spend time with us? Or did you leave the site a bigger fan than when you arrived?

We will be trying out methods such as survey measurement pre- and post-exposure as a starting point. This is a key area of focus as we consider how to measure the health of our brand.

eMarketer: Is this a marketing priority for your company?

Ms. Fuller: Yes, it is. I think it is a marketing priority for any marketer that’s increasing its share of spend online and is not simply evaluated by measured media spending online, but by dedicating a greater share of brainpower to it. I would say we’re at the beginning stages of figuring this out. It’s very top-of-mind and we will find an operating solution in the next couple of months.

eMarketer: How are you proceeding on this?

Ms. Fuller: We look at the time spent on our site and whether or not people engaged with the games that we have there, how much traffic we’re able to drive and viral activity.

Between our online and offline marketing activities, my concern is whether we are measuring brand health appropriately. Given our business model, the additional interest that digital marketing represents, in terms of engagement, is not ever going to be present with the offline marketing. One of the key issues [that] we want to understand is how engagement drives brand opinion, regardless of medium or strategy, and what is the best way to measure brand health.

For example, the process of moving beyond unaided brand awareness is a standard way that our category has measured brand health. We don’t think that’s adequate, because we’re a household brand in most of the markets in which we do business. Unaided brand awareness doesn’t really capture how consumers feel about our brand, so we need a better way to do it.

eMarketer: Any thoughts on how you might go about correlating engagement with brand health?

Ms. Fuller: It’s contingent on how you think you should be measuring brand health—period. It really starts there—with asking, “What is brand health?” Is it brand opinion, is it willingness to recommend something, is it willingness to pay a premium, is it being mentioned in social networks, is it someone agreeing to receive a MasterCard?

Then, and only then, can we start figuring out, “OK, if we’re happy with how we’re measuring engagement—which means looking at qualified actions, not simply clicks—how do we capture what effect that has on those eventual brand health metrics?”

eMarketer: What role does social media play in this process?

Ms. Fuller: For me, the question involves how a commercial entity engages with social media. It’s unresolved at this point. I would say if anything, it’s about risk avoidance and not doing anything stupid. We’re feeling our way through it.

eMarketer: Is the concept of measuring brand impact from online marketing and media flawed?

Ms. Fuller: It’s really hard, because there are so many factors. How can you possibly isolate the effect of any particular piece of communication? All of the problems that exist in measuring advertising and marketing efficacy exist in every environment—offline and online.

But we do have more behavioral clues in communications mediums that are geared toward engagement or behavior. It’s the same way it’s always been easy to measure the impact of direct mail.

eMarketer: Some marketers say it would be helpful to use gross rating points to plan and buy online media. Are you interested in that?

Ms. Fuller: I’m not looking for the same metrics for online as TV. We have different expectations for the two media. We use digital media to tell more complicated stories and drive engagement. The expectation for offline media is to deliver reach and frequency. I think they operate differently. I’m not looking for identical metrics.

eMarketer: Should the industry create a standardized online brand measurement system?

Ms. Fuller: There isn’t really a standardized way of looking at brand health regardless, so I’m not sure how the online industry could create something that’s standardized. I don’t know how you would approach it. It might be good to have a couple of leading methods. Rather than standardizing it, let’s develop a few different ways of doing it.