AdAge is running a story on a study conducted by ComScore, MySpace and Dunnhumby that reveals the results of a seven figure campaign by an unnamed personal-care brand that was run on MySpace and targeted at 76.9 million people. Of course you have to take these studies with a grain of salt since it’s basically an advertisement itself of why people should be spending money with the MySapce/FIM folks but the numbers do reflect some decent results in direct spending and the always important influence and "halo-effect" factor.
The campaign achieved a mere ~1% click through rate to the MySpace ad pages for the near 77 million exposed. The good number for the campaign however is the near 50% of the people that navigated to the MySpace ad page clicked on through to the advertisers site.
Working together with their data sets ComScore and Dunnhumby came up with the $1 million campaign yielding $1.28 million in offline sales. It was also found that nearly half of the ROI was attributed to the "halo-effect" of purchasing other products that the advertiser offered.
It seems like seven figures for the magic number this week for online campaigns as Microsoft announced a seven figure deal with Discovery Communications to be run across their display ad networks, mobile and text messaging, as well as in-game advertising to promote the Deadliest Catch.
Studies such as these although not an exact science, are very important for the ad industry as a whole. As the digital piece of the ad-pie expands to fully emerge of the "experimental" realm social media needs more studies like this conducted. The quicker companies become comfortable using social media to reach an audience the quicker the ad world can evolve from a purely clicks and impressions play to an audience delivery one.
