The PostView is a new column written by senior execs working in the European online advertising industry.

Every advertiser, vendor, agency and person in the industry has a different view on the role of Digital Display for Digital Marketing. Some believe it's a direct response tool to drive acquisitions and compete with paid search, some believe it's a super exciting branding medium up there with TV, others believe it's somewhere in between the two.

Which ever way you look at it, the 'role of digital display' has never been perfectly established, as opposed to other marketing channels such as TV, Press, SEM, Affiliates which have been.

There was a fantastic article earlier this week on Adexchanger entitled, "What if online doesn't work for branding?". In the article, Jerry Neumann highlights that marketeers know how to build brands, have been doing it for 100s of years, however of the total marketing budget that is spent, 2/3rd of it is on branding, yet online only ¼ of total spend is spent on branding. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this ¼ is being spent and measured incorrectly.

Marketers losing faith in display channel

This lack of definition in the channel has consequently lead to a lack of confidence in the channel and what it can and is meant to deliver for advertisers.

It's the only channel which is trying to scrabble around the 'last-click' model by reattributing conversions, and by running surveys to judge the impact of advertising in the channel, both of which are highly flawed solutions. Instead of gaming a channel to deliver perceived 'performance' or perceived 'branding', lets understand the role of the channel and utilise it, the way it should be utilised.

We get very excited and over-enthusiastic suppliers answering questions we didn't even know we had, and creating new and exciting solutions which we didn't realise we needed. I wanted to highlight a selection of top line statements that have come out of the digital display advertising industry in recent times, and try to get to the remote of where the confusion of the role of digital display is stemming from:

- DSP's publicising that they're winning 19/20 of tests vs other DSP's on 'performance'

Performance is determined as a last-click CPA goal. We all know where the majority of these conversions (that are undeduped at adserver level) are coming from, so this doesn't particularly differentiate this DSP from the competition.

- Viewability companies telling us that 40% of ads served are never seen and those that are, are often served to the incorrect audience.

Some very interesting discussion about this in the comments of last weeks post-view, Why the vGRP is not the silver bullet for display's metric problem, and it is unfortunate that companies have come out with these statements and are actually scaring advertisers, without offering any solutions to improve this.

- Google stated that they see a 4x better CTR than industry average across the Google Display Network

I might be wrong, but I thought we decided that CTR was a dying metric for measuring Display success? The Comscore Study from 2009 is still very relevant today, yet we are benchmarking Display and Display Creative success with this metric. Six months ago Google sent media buyers 4x greater than normal size post-it notepads (to highlight their CTR being 4x greater than their competitors), as a cheap marketing ploy to get on buyers desk. This is supposedly a leader in the display field.

- Retargeting companies serving ads up to 40x a day and selling this on a CPC model

Why are advertisers buying on a different buy model, than what the supplier is actually trading in? Because we are operating in a last-click world and this is easier for advertisers to understand? High frequency cookie bombing needs to stop, but this much easier said than done as it provides so much revenue for publishers and drives 'performance' for advertisers.

- Tag management and attribution solutions attributing credit in real time against a conversion that display didn't win on a last-click basis

This is a step in the right direction for Display, but still in my opinion is not the answer. There are some excellent systems that have been developed that can take converting user paths vs non converting with sophisticated algorithms, but none of them take into account all contributing factors to a conversion (competition in market, outdoor activity, position on page, cookie deletion etc.). These solutions are also only applicable for advertisers with a high enough volume of conversions to robustly say that Display had an impact. What about the products that only generate 100 conversions a week for example? What should they do?

It'd be better for the industry if Display differentiated itself from the last-click model completely, and looked at a solution where it isn't being benchmarked against click channels, or in a position where conversions have to be reattributed.

- Brand surveys which state they can measure brand recall, favorability and purchase intent

These are all relatively new metrics to Display, and have been brought in to try and bring brand advertisers online, with metrics they are comfortable with. The problem with these surveys is they are just so flawed, are sent to a particular set of users (those who are incentivised to fill data in), and certainly don't run to a robust enough pool of users. Branding online can generate a response, it's just measuring what that response is. Yes, it isn't a last-click conversion, but it also isn't these offline survey metrics.

I haven't even begun to cover multiple buy models in one channel, Facebook, dynamic creative, video, audience buying or targeting across multiple devices!

What is the point of all of these 'solutions' for Digital Display Marketing? Is everyone else getting confused?

Every Digital Display solution is coming at the industry from different points and I have yet to see one which is there to deliver marketing perfection. It's all just outrageously contradictory and causes many many questions from marketers, and is one of the primary reasons brand buying (the golden goose) isn't coming online.

Do you ever see an advertiser question the value of position one for a 'hero term' on SEO? You rarely see a client question the value of strong PPC brand and generic strategies. How often do you see advertisers question the value of Display? Very regularly, and the above list definitely doesn't help!

It's important to differentiate yourself in a competitive market, but looking at the list above, it's as though everyone is scratching for a solution that works for their advertisers/managements misguided business objectives (heck, some advertisers still think pop unders (forced clicks) are great performing for them!).

The problem this confusion causes is that advertisers just don't know who to believe, what to do, or how the hell to do it. Agencies are stuck in the middle trying to be 'innovative', but ultimately are doing the wrong things, buying with the wrong partners, hurrying around trying to set up their own trading desks with little resource and are trying to hit their advertisers existing business objectives better, and more cost efficiently than their competition could, rather than helping to identify what their business objectives for online marketing should be.

Living in a "last-click" world

Arguably the most successful channel for advertisers is Paid Search, largely because we live in the 'last-click' world, but also because there is very few entry points to the user, has a consistent buy model, and enables campaign managers to really optimise the campaigns as there is little confusion over what the objective of Paid Search is.

Digital Display needs to adopt a consistent approach to what it's role is within the marketing mix, and this need to starts from not being directly compared with click based intent channels and not to be bought on multiple buy models. This approach needs to go all the way to the top of marketing organisations, as the way things stand, the confusion and inconsistency will hold back the digital display industry.