There continues to be a lot of controversy and interest around the merits of branding online. To Melissa’s point in her last entry, a lot of marketers question their ability to prove out that branding investments pay-off. They are unsure as how to set up measurements and metrics around a branding ROI exercise.

I’d like to share a couple of methodologies we have used. One methodology is to set-up a pre and post email survey of your audience prior to running any branding-focused sponsorship. A prerequisite for this working is that the audience you email is in fact pretty much the same audience that will be exposed to your sponsorship. It’s essential to ask them questions about their unaided or aided awareness of your brand prior to exposing them to your messaging or creative content and then to ask them after a considerable duration of time (I’d say minimally 6-8 weeks) has passed.

Another methodology we’ve tried has been in conjunction with Dynamic Logic, where they tag and survey viewers of banner ads and compare results from a controlled group (those that haven’t seen the ads), to those of an exposed group, (those that have seen the ads). When we have done this we have been amazed to see that an advertiser’s brand ranking amongst competitors can actually go up a couple of points in a two to three months timeframe. This not only proves out the worthiness of the branding sponsorship, it showcases how any branding exercise in general is accelerated on the internet.

Again, if the client’s messaging stands out it’s quite remarkable how much higher awareness levels are when our audiences have seen a client’s ad campaign more than once.

I’d be curious as to what you have used to test branding effectiveness online or welcome comments on the two methodologies I just described.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 11:54 am and is filed under Best practices, ROI, Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.