We’ve just come to the end of the fifth IAB Interact Congress in Barcelona and it’s been a very interesting and rewarding couple of days. Interact brought 400 delegates from the online advertising industry together to discuss thoughts, plans and hopes for the industry going forward and featured great speakers from across the media space. Microsoft Advertising was represented by a number of speakers including Marc Bresseel, who keynoted on ‘Mastering the new digital’, and Beth Uyenco, who lead the research stream of the audience through ‘Microsoft Shopper Journeys’.

This year’s congress took the theme “Together Forever? Online + traditional media in perfect harmony”. With the release of the 2011 AdEx survey – the definitive guide to the state of the European advertising market – kicking off Interact, we saw that digital is certainly giving traditional media a run for it’s money. With a 15.3% growth rate in 2010 the online advertising market outperformed the overall European advertising market, which grew at 5.0% in the same period. The survey also revealed that display advertising overtook search as the fastest growing online ad format in Europe, growing at 21.3% against search’s 15.1%. Across the board, the picture is a promising and exciting one for digital advertising.

I was excited to be part of the second Microsoft Advertising Ad Vision Series panel discussions at Interact, which took the theme 'Better together? TV+ Online'. Expertly introduced and moderated by Guy Phillipson of IAB UK, I was joined on the panel by Antony Rhind of Havas Digital, Phil Macauley of Quantcast and Steve Brown of Yahoo! To introduce the panel Guy shared some fascinating new IAB/Thinkbox research which documents the strength of TV and online when used together. Although the study focused specifically on multi-screen ‘digital consumers’, so suggests future trends rather than general current media consumption, it showed that using TV and online advertising together results in 47% more positivity about a brand than using either in isolation, and that the likelihood of buying or using a product increases by more than 50% when TV and online are used together.

It’s certainly my belief that the interactive and social elements that online offers must be central to a strategy in order to deliver the kind of far reaching, engaging campaign that consumers are really connecting with right now. People really want to interact with the brands they consume and this is something that TV alone cannot offer. They also want more control over what they see and how they engage with it: this interactive element is demonstrated by the fact that 40% of time spent on Xbox is on non-gaming activity.

Our discussion also covered how we measure consumer engagement, and subsequent likelihood to purchase, and it was interesting to see the numerous ways that each member of the panel quantified the various strategies they’ve put in place and the resulting ROI. I strongly believe that the ad industry would be much stronger if we could agree on a shared set of measurement tools, but that’s a whole new discussion perhaps best left for another post. The full Ad Vision Series discussion will be available soon on the Microsoft Advertising Community Site, check it out for some more great insights.

We can also report awards success from IAB Interact, as Microsoft Advertising won a 2011 IAB Europe Research Award in the Branding category for our research Dwell on Branding. The study makes the case for measuring dwell score – calculated by multiplying the amount of time a user spends engaging with an advert with the rate of engagement – as the de facto measure for digital brand campaigns and to only resort to click through rates (CTR) and page impressions for simple direct response campaigns. . We were up against some strong competition and it’s a great credit to our research teams that our entry was judged the best – Well done guys!

We had a fantastic response to our Twitter commentary of both my and Marc’s appearances as well as many mentions from other Twitter users. Since ‘Interact’ was the name of the game it was great to see this level of digital interaction. Some of our most retweeted tweets and mentions included:

  • @MSAdvertising:'People are looking for greater interactivity between brands and consumers: TV alone doesn't offer this' Laurent Delaporte #interact2011
  • @IABEU_Interact: Great to be obsessed by technology... better to be obsessed by great storytelling. Marc Bresseel Microsoft Advertising
  • @nuttakorn: Interesting to see top activity list RT @MSAdvertising: ‘40% of time spent on Xbox is on non-gaming activity’: Laurent Delaporte

Overall it’s been a great congress and we’ve seen some truly inspirational ideas and examples presented by the cream of the online advertising industry. I’d like to finish on a quote from Marc Bresseel’s keynote speech at Interact as I feel it sums up the excitement and vitality that was in the air in Barcelona: “this is the end of the beginning: the new era is the era of digital”.

Thank you,

Laurent Delaporte, Vice President EMEA, Microsoft Advertising