On the 18th of June 2012 a demonstration was given in how the traditional advertising  campaign approach is missing opportunities online.

On that day a number of tweets were from NAB to Australian Twitter users. They let users know that a new campaign to ‘reward honesty’ had been launched. I received one of these tweets and my interest was piqued. The succession of web pages that followed told me that a big opportunity is being missed, and had also been missed during the bank’s major ‘Break up’ campaign.

The original tweet said “…we noticed you enjoyed our Honesty Experiments last yr. This yr it’s about rewarding honesty…” [sic]. Included with that tweet is a link which, when clicked, takes you to a YouTube page with an extended version of the current TV ad. The end of the video then has a link which takes you to a campaign landing page which has more videos and information about the credit card product that is being promoted.

That sounds like a reasonable sales funnel. A few clicks and you are at the campaign page. But that’s not the end of the story because from that page you can then go to a Facebook page, view Twitter comments or apply for the card itself. That is the first error. The path becomes fragmented right at the point of application – increasing the chance of losing the audience.

But it isn’t the biggest error. The major flaw is that over the course of the seven clicks and many minutes of video watching the viewer is never asked to input their details – unless they are actually applying for the credit card.

Here’s the rub. The product is actually a good offering. The campaign is interesting and engaging. But there is no allowance for viewers who are busy at the time of viewing, the ones who think, “I’m interested, but not right now”. The user either applies for the card there and then (if they don’t get lost in the web of landing pages and clicks) or they don’t convert.

The new NAB campaign is missing a major data collection opportunity. And it is not alone. There are very few large brands which have really taken the time to develop a social-data strategy. For decades traditional advertising has worked through generating mass awareness and broad appeal. With an increasingly fractured media landscape there needs to be much more focus on following-up mass marketing. Tailored communications are becoming vital. Collecting user data is the only way to do this effectively.

This tells us that a change in the way that online campaigns are measured needs to take place. The ROI for a campaign needs to be measured not just in conversion-based activity, but also pre-conversion data collection.

We need to ask: how many more people could have been convinced to take up the offer if the marketers actually knew who they were and how to talk to them?