Marketers are too focused on click-through rates when it comes to display advertising, argued Matt Newcomb, general manager of online and video advertising company InSkin Media.

“The idea that you can’t build brands online is completely ridiculous,” he told B&T.

“When you think about all the sight, sound, motion…the amazing creative that you can build, the amount of space you’ve got to play with – some people still think you can’t build brands online. It’s a total fallacy. Of course you can, and you should.”

With offices around all around the world, InSkin Media has touched down on Aussie shores to help showcase how important creative is when it comes to building brands online and in display advertising.

“We’d like to see more discussion on the value of online branding. So many marketers just see click though rate as the metric for whether their campaign has been any good or not,” said Newcomb.

“We want to talk about how people have engaged with that piece of marketing communication, how much time they’ve spent with a brand, what impact it’s had.

“High quality creative helps drive the result. It’s not just about distribution, but distribution is clearly very important.”

Where the traditional media channels such as TV, print and radio are great for building brands and brand attributes, Newcomb said the same can be true for online.

“People can build brands online, despite what lots of people think,” he said. “It’s just that so many people focus on click through rather than building brands.”

Newcomb argued there is definitely scope for some of the dollars coming into digital from print and other channels to be involved in building brands online.

“It’s almost like digital started off as a direct response channel, and everyone started to evaluate it, really in terms of ‘how many clicks do I get’. And if you’re at the top of the funnel and you’re trying to interest someone in your brand and convey some brand attributes about why someone might be interested in your product or your service – click through is a terrible measure for measuring that.”

“We definitely need to get more sophisticated around how we think about online, particularly in relations to branding.

“There’s some amazing things being done, some amazing measurement tools, but click-through rate is not the only metric that matters. It can’t be.”