It’s nice to see mainstream marketing execs hop on the online branding bandwagon. It’s been a long time coming, and we were tired of being lone voices in the wilderness. I’ve urged our clients to think bigger than short-term direct response for years. They should add longer-term branding campaigns to online marketing budgets.

Two years ago, Anthony Garcia, our senior persuasion architect blogged the following:

Direct response marketing singularly focuses on selling customers in the market TODAY. The pitfall with that approach is that every day that you wake up you are pushing to persuade an entirely different set of customers to buy. Doesn’t sound like much fun does it?…

If you are looking for brand lift don’t discount the potential of an online branding strategy. While the entire world has been treating the internet exclusively as a direct response vehicle (and it is a darn good one) [we] have been successfully deploying… online branding strategies with our clients for quite some time.

In his post, Garcia delves into neuroscience and explains why the online channel delivers a more relevant, memorable experience than the more traditional channels. And with the advent of Web analytics software, many marketers realized the channel also provides a more accurate source of behavioral data in a more timely, efficient manner.

But somewhere along the way, marketers were led astray by technology-focused, report jockeys. Just because they can implement Web analytics software and read reports doesn’t make them qualified to offer marketing advice. Poorly planned scenarios with retrofitted key performance indicators (KPIs) fed the notion that the Web is all about direct marketing. Today, the Web is the center of all customer-centric marketing efforts. And many CMOs later, marketing accountability is non-negotiable.

Continue reading my column at ClickZ…