• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 8, 2012

For all the noise surrounding display’s RTB marketplace, what advertisers and agencies really want is premium inventory from premium publishers, and Pam Horan, president of the Online Publishers Association, has the data to prove it. And she presented it for the first time during this morning’s OMMA Premium Display conference in New York.

“So much focus has been on programmatic buying over the past few months,” Horan said, adding. “What we wanted to do is take a step back and make sure we were hearing from a very important person, which is the brand marketer and the agencies supporting them.”

The “we” Horan was referring to was the OPA and Advertiser Perceptions Inc., which for the past eight years has been doing some pretty solid research on the opinions and sentiment of advertisers and agencies about various media. To get to the bottom of what Madison Avenue really wants from online publishers, the API team surveyed 250 marketers and agency professionals involved with brand-focused image advertising and found, not surprisingly, that they are still pretty keen on premium publishing content advertising opportunities.

In fact, asked what online publishing source was the “best” media type for their needs, the No. 1 response was premium content publishers. Forty-seven percent of the respondents cited premium content publishers vs. only 16% who cited the No. 2 option, social media, and 10% who cited the No. 3 option, display ad networks.

Detailed findings can be accessed on the OPA’s site at www.Online-publishers.org, but Horan shared a few more details with the OMMA crowd, including what brand marketers and agencies are most looking for from online publishers.

The No. 1 response (cited by 73% of respondents) was “target audiences,” followed by “ability to achieve brand objectives” (63%), and “brand quality/image” (61%), and “context” (48%).

“This is why they ranked the premium publishers as being able to deliver on this,” Horan said, noting that while social media is doing “very well” in terms of delivery on target audiences, it “falls short on delivering on some of these other attributes” such as brand objectives, brand quality and image.

In terms of what brand objectives were most important to marketers using online publishing, Horan said the survey found that “classic branding objectives,” such as brand consideration, preference, purchase intent, aided and unaided awareness were dominant.

“Classic branding objectives still remain front-and-center,” Horan said, adding, “They have identified the fact that they have a preference for delivering those objectives through premium content publishers.”