A recent U.S. study may shed some light on the issue. Over the 6 month period of its "Online Advertising Report"; AdKnowledge tagged millions of Internet users who were exposed to banners ads and then watched their behaviours. They found that the people who saw an ad, but never clicked, made more conversions to on-line sales/actions than the people who had clicked on the banners. This result reinforces that the return on investment (ROI) for on-line advertising is likely much higher than it seems simply from click-through-rates. Steve Findley, V.P. of AdKnoweldge, summed it up by claiming that "advertisers that focus only on clicks or even post-click conversions may miss vitally important effects of advertising campaigns."

The element of accountability – being able to develop concrete metrics such as cost-per-customer acquired – is the real benefit to come from on-line marketing. By working together as a unified industry, traditional and new media, we are finally able to offer clients effective campaigns with exact measurement.

Banner ads are just a small part of on-line marketing, as are opt-in emails, rich media and WAP. Like cinema ads, busses and post cards, these are tools, which have their use, but to be most effective they must be integrated into the rest of a campaign. Integrating on-line marketing allows us to move beyond measuring just recall & recognition, as the recent HKBU study did, and start measuring the real drivers of our clients1 businesses: Preference, Sales and Loyalty. Only by taking this important step towards inter-agency cooperation & integration will we be able to tap these incredible new capabilities. As Jack says: "Why can't we all just get along?"