Gian Fulgoni, comScore Inc.
Gian Fulgoni
Chairman and Co-Founder
comScore Inc.
An authority in digital measurement, Gian Fulgoni brings more than 30 years of experience to comScore. Prior to comScore, he was president and CEO of Information Resources Inc. (IRI), an international market research company that specializes in consumer and shopper intelligence. He also serves on the board of directors of the Advertising Research Foundation.
In the following interview, Mr. Fulgoni discusses the impact of online brand advertising and how it influences search, the ongoing role and importance of traditional media metrics and the need to tie ads viewed online to offline consumer purchases.
eMarketer: Have we moved away from the click as a proxy for online advertising effectiveness?
Gian Fulgoni: I think a publisher would be out of their mind to take an average click rate of 0.1% and try to take that to an advertiser or an agency and say, “Here’s an indication of advertising effectiveness.” It’s not the right metric. It’s a really short-term view of how advertising works as a direct-response-oriented vehicle and not a branding-oriented one.
Let’s say I’m BMW. Do I want to reach a 20-year-old kid who can’t afford to buy a BMW today? The direct response people would say, “No, don’t target with the Internet.” They would target those people who are about to buy a car. That’s one view.
The branding people would say that at some point, the 20-year-old kid is going to buy a BMW or a Lexus or a Mercedes, so let’s make sure that he has the BMW brand value and equity in his head. Otherwise, he’s going to buy a Mercedes or a Lexus.
eMarketer: That’s right. A lot of people view the Internet as a direct response medium.
Mr. Fulgoni: That is just nonsense. Why should the Internet be any different from print or TV or radio in terms of its ability to create a branding value versus direct response? There’s no inherent reason why the Internet shouldn’t be used for branding in addition to direct response.
Here’s a provocative theory: Is the preoccupation with direct response partly a result of so many young people being involved in Internet advertising? DR is immediate gratification. Maybe they don’t understand branding. They don’t have a long-term perspective and they don’t have patience. They gravitate towards direct response.
I think search has just exacerbated the issue because there’s no question that search works, but it is the last step in the purchase funnel. If we attribute all of the value or accountability to somebody buying something by that last click on a search ad, I think that would be really shortsighted and would ignore all of the other influences that come into play with branding.
eMarketer: But isn’t search often the beginning point for many consumers?
Mr. Fulgoni: It can be a beginning, but I would suggest that that assumes that somehow all of the other media that impact a person’s psyche have no effect. There’s an image, a perception, a value that they already have at the point that they conduct the search. It’s not like consumers are sitting there with no impression of a brand until they conduct a search. I don’t believe it.
eMarketer: Is all audience measurement inherently flawed? Do existing methods actually reflect that a consumer watched a streaming video or TV show or saw an ad on a Webpage or in a magazine?
Mr. Fulgoni: I don’t think they’re flawed. You need to know how many people are exposed to a particular medium. That’s why you have TV ratings. You have radio. You have Internet. GRPs [gross rating points] are the common element.
Advertisers want to know how many people saw or read the message and how many times. That’s basically creative and GRPs. Let’s just accept that the click is just not telling the whole story.
We don’t hold traditional media to the same standard of accountability. Why should the Internet be measured by this immediate-response method called a click?
On our panel we can track people over time. We know if they downloaded a page that had an ad. It’s very easy for us to post our data to a group of people who saw an ad and then a control group balanced behaviorally and demographically who didn’t see the ad.
I wrote a white paper for the Journal of Advertising called “Whither the Click?” that basically shows that people who are exposed to a display ad, whether or not they click on it, have an increased likelihood of visiting the Website of the brand in the ad, an increased likelihood of conducting a search query, of buying online and buying offline.
There is compelling evidence that an ad impression on the Internet works just like an ad impression in traditional media.
eMarketer: How is Dynamic Logic’s service different?
Mr. Fulgoni: Our comparable service is called Brand Metrix—it measures traditional branding metrics like awareness, likability and purchase intent. We are able to adjust for cookie deletion in the methodology. Cookie deletion is a big issue today. I think for a long time people tried to act like it didn’t exist.
There are several independent studies showing that 30% of people delete their cookies in a month. If you’re using cookies to track behavior, you’ve got a big problem. We also take into account the way cookie deletion could affect our research methodology, and we don’t think Dynamic Logic does.
eMarketer: What categories are doing a good job with online brand measurement?
Mr. Fulgoni: I think most people would agree that the consumer packaged goods sector is very sophisticated when it comes to market research. They’ve got scanner sales data that comes from actual purchases and they’re beginning to apply those techniques to the Internet. They are looking way beyond a click.
We’re looking at the cumulative effects of the campaign, not just its immediate ability to get a click. The click’s irrelevant. We don’t even look at it. It’s cumulative impressions. Then we’re looking at the ability of the campaign to get somebody to buy a product at retail.
eMarketer: What is the biggest hurdle for online brand measurement?
Mr. Fulgoni: The Internet is the most measurable and accountable medium. You’ve heard the phrase. I just think that’s a gross overstatement of reality.
If you believe that the Internet affects how people buy at retail stores, not just online, then you need to measure the retail impact. The trick is understanding the link between a person’s online exposure and what they do at retail.
We use the comScore panel, and with permission from our panelists use their names and addresses to link to third-party databases. One of those could be a retailer’s loyalty card database. That’s what we do with dunnhumby [a consumer and data insights research firm].
We set up a test versus a control situation, then we look at whether the test group bought more of the brand as measured through scanner data at retail compared to the control group.
If you really want to measure the effectiveness of a campaign, you’ve got to move beyond its immediate ability with one exposure to generate consumer action.
eMarketer: To what extent does your system take into account the blend of online and offline ad exposure?
Mr. Fulgoni: We want to isolate the effects of the online piece. We’re not measuring the impact of the other media in this particular approach. We want to measure the Internet, but it’s the Internet in the context of everything else that’s going on out there. We are really trying to isolate the people who were exposed to the Internet campaign and look at them compared to a control group.
I don’t think market mix modeling, which started with packaged goods and scanner data at retail, is sensitive enough to pick up the impact of online media, and especially given that there is relatively low spending on the Internet compared to TV, print and promotions.
eMarketer: People do not really buy food or shampoo online unless we are talking about FreshDirect, but they are interested in promotions, downloadable coupons and samples.
Mr. Fulgoni: Right. And the CPG brands that are beginning to move dollars online are running brand studies to give them some confidence that they’re getting what they want. They’re running the studies with us through our Brand Metrix service or they could be using Nielsen or Dynamic Logic.
eMarketer: Is the GRP on its way out?
Mr. Fulgoni: I think one would be crazy not to continue using the GRP as a metric. What it’s telling you is how many times you reach the person with an ad and how many people you’re reaching. I mean, if you don’t have that, I don’t see how you can really understand the intricacies of your media plan or compare it across media.
We’re talking about influencing people to behave a certain way. You’ve got to measure how many times you say something to them. That’s the way that media is sold. You can talk all you want about social media, but the idea that it’s going to replace “push” advertising—personally, I’m not there yet.
eMarketer: How about reconciling the GRPs of a TV or print campaign with online campaign metrics?
Mr. Fulgoni: It’s doable today. We produce GRP measures directly analogous to TV, to print and radio. We can provide an advertiser and its agency with the same computed reach and frequency numbers for the Internet that they use in other media. Mobile will probably be the next one.
eMarketer: Should the industry create a standardized online brand measurement system?
Mr. Fulgoni: I don’t think creating a standardized online brand measurement system is the American way. Companies have their own way of doing things. In my experience, it’s very difficult to force a standard way of measuring something on the industry unless there’s a monopoly.
eMarketer: To what extent can marketers integrate the measurement of search and display advertising today, providing appropriate attribution to each?
Mr. Fulgoni: We do it today. We looked at people only exposed to a search ad, only to a display ad or both. If you see a search ad, by definition you initiated it because you conducted the search. The incremental impact is high.
If you see a display ad, there’s an incremental impact, but it’s not as great as the incremental impact from a search ad. If you combine the two, you get synergy. What it says to me is that running a display overlay on a search campaign is the way to go.
Then we do a test and control. We know who saw the search ad. We know who saw the display ad. We know who saw neither and we know who saw both. We also look at the behavioral impact and whether people bought more at retail or whether they did something online. We want to know their behavior.
eMarketer: What is the potential game-changer for online brand measurement?
Mr. Fulgoni: First of all, this recession is having a dislocation impact and it’s causing advertisers to look more closely at the Internet than they might have because of the cost savings. At the same time, it does cause some advertisers to pull back on the total amount of dollars that they’re putting into advertising. So relative share shifts to the more efficient medium.
Even though online advertising’s growth is slowing, it’s not slowing the way advertising is in traditional media. It’s gaining share. One should think of online as a branding medium in addition to a direct response medium.
