Research Shows that Advertising on Quality, Content-driven Sites Outperforms Industry Norms on Every Measure of Brand Awareness and Persuasion

NEW YORK, NY -- July 22, 2002 -- The Online Publishers Association (OPA) today released a new White Paper entitled Assessing the Value of Loyal Audiences, the second in a series of OPA White Papers intended to provide marketers with a better understanding of the role of various metrics in evaluating a Web site's advertising potential and determining its advertising value.

Putting the current flurry of online ad effectiveness research into perspective, the OPA worked with research firm Dynamic Logic to aggregate the results of nearly 300 different Dynamic Logic studies into a database of MarketNorms^TM for online advertising overall. These MartketNorms, based on surveys of more then 300,000 consumers, clearly demonstrate that online advertising has a profound impact on Brand Awareness and Brand Message Association.

Going a step further, the OPA White Paper then analyzes the combined results of 37 separate Dynamic Logic studies performed on nine different high-quality news and information sites, all of which are members of the OPA. These combined results are used to compare the performance of advertisements placed on highly engaging content sites to the Dynamic Logic MarketNorms^TM for online advertising overall.

The data show that premium, branded content sites outperform the industry norms on every available measure -- more than doubling advertising impact in Unaided Awareness (27.5% lift versus 11.3% lift) and outperforming the weighted average by two-thirds on Message Association (32.6% lift versus 19.4% lift).

In addition to achieving a significant advantage in Unaided Awareness and Message Association, advertisers on OPA sites also experienced notable gains in Aided Awareness (5.3% lift versus 4.4% lift), Brand Favorability (1.6% lift versus 1.2% lift) and Purchase Intent (1.6% lift versus 1.5% lift) over industry norms.

"This research demonstrates that there is an apparent interaction working to advertisers' advantage on sites for which visitors have high affinity and loyalty," said Michael Zimbalist, executive director of the Online Publishers Association. "The reason that advertisers are getting greater impact from these types of sites may be due to the high level of involvement that consumers have with high-quality content. It's also likely that when a consumer has a high regard for an editorial brand, there is a 'halo effect' on the advertisements they see within that context."

The OPA is currently fielding primary research to further investigate this phenomenon.

Assessing the Value of Loyal Audiences is available, free-of charge, at the OPA Web site at www.online-publishers.org

About the Online Publishers Association

Founded in June 2001, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) is an industry trade organization whose mission is to advance the interests of high-quality online publishers before the advertising community, the press, the government and the public. Members of OPA represent the standards in Internet publishing with respect to editorial quality and integrity, credibility and accountability. OPA member sites have a combined, unduplicated reach of 55.3 million visitors, or 45.6% of the total active Web audience. (Source: Nielsen//NetRatings, May 2002 combined home/work data). For more information about the Online Publishers Association, visit www.online-publishers.org.

CONTACT:
Lisa Carparelli
Online Publishers Association
(917) 743-4537
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