DIRECT; Track that consumer

AdMedia,  Oct 18, 2004  by Steven Shaw

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The ability to measure the penetration of a DM campaign is essential; it's one of the benefits of a DM campaign and a self- imposed expectation of the DM industry itself. With issues of privacy and permission constantly in the spotlight, tracking the behaviour of consumers doesn't necessarily mean you have to know exactly who they are ...

so long as you know what they're doing.Auckland's Media Technology Group is excited about a new CD/DVD product it has on offer. On board the discs is a technology which answers the question direct marketers always want answered: "Is my ad being seen?"GM David Hill explains: "We've developed a little bit of code that goes on every page - it tells us what has been opened. There's also a time code that tells us how long a person has looked at a particular page. When they close it sends a file back to our database that gives us that information."Media Technology Group started out as CD duplicators and moved into digital media when it started doing work for ISP Xtra. In 1998 it opened a CD plant in Ponsonby and by 2001 had expanded into Australia. "We've always seen ourselves as more than just a CD replicator," says Hill, "we can't compete with the Asian influence and other replicators who just make bits of plastic. So we've always looked at smart solutions around it. That's where the smart CD comes in."The disks can contain advertisements or marketing information in the form of competitions, games, short movies and promotional material about a product or company. Once activated, the disk keeps track of what is viewed and reports back via the internet to the marketer. The marketer not only knows that the CD was used but what content was viewed. The information the CD sends back is simply basic information such as what was viewed and when."It's not spyware," says Hill "We don't go onto the person's hard drive to collect information. We only gather information around the CD and we don't gather any personal information whatsoever."Another company offering tracking services is Calcium Software, with a product called Imprint. A standalone tool in itself, Imprint is a web tracker that analyses visitor behaviour on a website.Calcium is mainly known for its email branding tool, mailPrimer, a template that wraps business emails with corporate design. Calcium says its research (conducted in partnership with the DMA) shows that more than 40% of business communication is conducted by email. MailPrimer simply places email text in a pre-determined template, just as if you were printing a traditional letter on corporate letterhead. This, it says, maximises the opportunity of what it calls "implied permission" when companies are in daily communication with each other.Imprint, when used in conjunction with MailPrimer, enables direct marketers to trace a campaign through from the email to the click-through on the website, right through to conversion.Andrew Butel, technical director at Calcium, says one example of a business using Imprint is Auckland's Hell Pizza Deliveries. "Have you seen those little cartoon devils at the bottom of the screen? On average people throw those 20 times. With Imprint they're able to see that 35% of people hang around on the website. They've ordered the pizza and they may have to wait for 40 minutes. So what a company can do is look at providing more content - and maybe get more money out of you."And what about personal info? "There's the potential, but 'no' is the answer," says Butel. "We know who the email is sent to. The company usually just wants to know if its campaign is successful, so there's no need for that information. If it's doing a day-to-day personal email with someone and wants to know how that person responds, we can provide that information."That's where it does become 'a little bit interesting' in terms of privacy, says Butel, but he stresses that as members of the DMA all work is in line with accepted practice."At the moment we can see that they've viewed the email and what they've clicked on - without them knowing - and that's really as far as we take it. That information is effectively in the public domain because they're using the internet."

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