IAB Preaching Engagement

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is embarking on a branding campaign for interactive media, touting its ability to engage audiences better than other ad vehicles.

The new trade campaign, with a kaleidoscope theme and the tagline “Media More Engaging,” aims to convince marketers to spend more of their budgets on interactive advertising. It positions interactive advertising as the go-to medium for reaching the right customers, engaging them in an immersive brand experience, and then measuring the effectiveness of the dollars spent.

“Interactive Advertising lets you combine the ability to target and create a dialogue with the audience that matters to your brand, lets your customer experience your brand the way they want to, and allows you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing dollars,” said Sheryl Draizen, the IAB’s SVP and general manager. “This delivers a very powerful proposition for marketers to achieve their objectives.”

The campaign will begin with print and online ads in the advertising industry press, and extend to other online and offline media buys next year. Havas’ Media Contacts is handling media planning, buying and trafficking pro-bono. The primary targets for the campaign are brand managers and marketing executives across all verticals, with a secondary target of agency professionals.

The ads will link to a microsite, developed by Brand New World, that provides strategies for several flavors of interactive advertising, including video, display ads, e-mail, gaming, lead-generation, local, mobile and search.

“Our goal in developing an overarching positioning and theme for the Interactive advertising industry was to find a way to communicate all the diverse capabilities and benefits of Interactive under one umbrella,” Draizen said. “As marketers continue to embrace and allocate additional dollars to all forms of Interactive, it is important that we clearly articulate and showcase the true power of the medium.”