It seems as though every week there is a new “hottest, fastest growing” channel for reaching customers.  Preroll for online video is exploding.  Mobile and short-code marketing is gaining steam fast.  Widgets and advergaming are two more advertising outlets that, for all intents and purposes, didn’t exist a few short years ago, but which are now getting line items on company advertising budgets. 

So which of these up-and-comers is the real “best channel” for a company’s advertising dollars?  Any business that is serious about reaching the ever-more-elusive target audience should probably be investigating and testing a mix of different channels.  The more important question is, “Has our brand message been developed to engage our target audience regardless of the channel it reaches them via?” 

As more consumers become active in remixing and redistributing corporate communications online through blogging, social networks, and other channels, it becomes crucial to brand the content itself.  A business cannot completely control what users decide to do with their messaging, content and other brand assets online.  What we can control is the quality of the original content. 

Similarly, a well-crafted brand message should work equally well, with minimal changes, across multiple channels or media.  While the delivery and execution of the message can (and should!) be honed to make the most of the particular media channel selected, the message itself should always remain consistent and on-brand. 

Like many in interactive advertising and marketing, I’m encouraged by the recent report that Nielsen is switching to a more practical and relevant criteria model for their online ranking system (http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2007/07/10/nielsen-shuts-window-on-pageview-rankings/).

While pageviews were a benchmark for the early days of the Web, in recent years it has become increasingly obvious that a more useful criteria should be used. Particularly as technologies like AJAX become more widely used, pageview statistics become of less and less use to interactive marketers.

However, I don’t know that the new criteria, length of time spent on a site, is a perfect solution, either. For one thing, it actually penalizes the sites with the best usability in terms of navigation. Google dropped in importance because users quickly find what they’re looking for and leave the search page. Does that speed and ease of use decrease Google’s relevance?

It also gives possibly undeserved weight to sites that are music and/or video heavy. How much of that time you spent on a video-intensive site was spent waiting for the media to load? Should the site get credit for that time? Actually, you could possibly make the argument that if the content is worth users waiting out the load times, they should get credit for that time.

While it’s not a perfect benchmark, it was definitely a step in the right direction and a timely one. As online ad budgets continue to grow in comparison to offline spending, the metrics that determine where those dollars are spent need to be based on more relevant criteria than pageviews.