In research posted after the ad:tech San Francisco show wrapped up, a couple nice meaty data points surfaced. The research polled attendees of the show about some of their planned behaviors. Two of them stand out for our readers:

• 89% of show attendees are interested in buying performance marketing
• 24% plan to buy performance marketing

Most of us knew that this trend to performance was alive and well, but these stats coming from a show of online advertisers of all sizes bear out the fact that online media will soon mean online performance media. Advertisers are looking for results and they are flocking to the performance model. Of course, all of us here at MediaTrust welcome this continued movement.  Its great to see the data point out that almost a quarter of the online media sector’s prime movers are planning on buying performance based media.

So the pressure on delivering results with smaller budgets has shifted the focus on our industry segment. Now the door of opportunity is open further for the industry to  deliver for our advertisers by making the process easier and safer for advertisers of all sizes.

So the next question is this: After learning to leverage pay-for-results advertising, do these same advertisers go back to spending a lot on impression-based media once we return to more robust budgets?

I tend to think not…once advertisers taste the sweet honey of paying for results, they’ll have a hard time going back to the old ways of backing into their effective CPAs using complex excel worksheets.

What do you think?