SonyEricsson: 'Online ads do build brands'
19 November 2004 16:02
People who say they don't are talking 'rubbish', says marketing chiefOnline advertising plays a key role in brand building - and people who say it can't are talking "absolute rubbish", according to the global brand director of SonyEricsson.
Andrew Warner, a former head of marketing at bbc.co.uk, said this week that perceptions of the internet are changing as more and more clients realise its potential. But he believes too many marketers still see it primarily as a direct response mechanism.
Warner, who joined SonyEricsson in the autumn from Microsoft UK, where he was group manager of the online communications team, was speaking at the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising's (IPA) Online Creativity event yesterday.
He said: "People who say online advertising doesn't build brands are talking absolute rubbish." However, he did concede that it is "rare" for a brand to be built through online alone.
SonyEricsson spends around 30 per cent of its global marketing budget on the web - a much higher proportion than most companies allocate to it. The latest figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau show that online takes a 3.24 per cent share of UK advertising spend.
This is partly because the mobile phone company does not have the same resources as the likes of Vodafone and T-Mobile, but Warner is convinced the internet is undervalued by most organisations.
He believes part of this problem is the relative cheapness of advertising on the internet. For anything to be taken seriously in business it has to be expensive, Warner argued.
"We have to stop presenting online as a cheap, second-tier medium," he said.
The IPA event was hosted by Rory Sutherland, the executive creative director of OgilvyOne Worldwide, who agreed with Warner's analysis.
Speaking specifically of the role of creatives in online advertising, he said: "We have to become more expensive - that way we'll get more attention. It's crazy, but true."
He pointed to a recent survey from the European Interactive Advertising Association showing that people now spend 20 per cent of their weekly time with media surfing the web - nearly 10 times higher than the proportion of adspend it receives.
"A woefully small amount of money is going into this channel," Sutherland said. "It's laughable."
He claimed that while media agencies and clients think very carefully about whether to advertise in The Times or the Telegraph, very little time is spent deciding which platforms should be used. "Individual media are allocated scientifically, but disciplines are not. That is usually done on a whim," he said.
Until this changes, the mismatch between media consumption and media spend will continue to exist, he argued.
According to the latest forecast from the Advertising Association, expenditure will increase 4.4 per cent across all media in 2005, with the internet enjoying a 30.3 per cent surge.
By Graham Hayday
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