We hope you enjoyed our Media Effectiveness event.
Effectiveness in Context:
Les Binet & Peter Field
Effectiveness in Context is 4th in a series of research projects in to the IPA databank,
to understand what drives effectiveness in marketing
Marketing works best with a combination of long-term brand building and short-term activation.
Brand building protects the pricing power of brands, and boosts short term effects. This was supported by an example from Churchill which demonstrated the power of the brand in driving click throughs on price comparison websites.
When activation is easy upweight brand; when brand building is easy, upweight activation
There are a number of factors where the 60:40 split needs to be modified:
The optimum mix changes as a brand matures – from 35% brand building at launch, to 72% when they are a leader in their sector
Innovators do need to advertise with an optimum split of 72:28 vs. non innovators 61:39
The split for brands where consumers do a lot of research and for online brands is 74:26 vs. 55:45 for low research or offline brands. Subscription models also benefit from a stronger upweight in brand advertising
From a sector perspective, upweight brand in financial services and down-weight in B2B. Most other sectors sit around the 60:40 average
Despite tech firms eschewing brand building as emotional drizzle, their investment in to TV as a brand building channel continues to rise year on year.
The presentation highlighted 2 examples of brands who have over-invested in efficient, performance driven short term activation in digital media at the expense of brand building: Adidas and AA.
Activation is getting easier, so brand building is becoming more important: the 60:40 rule is shifting further to brand yet spend figures show an ‘activation tide’ where the split has moved from 61:39 in 2000, to 45:55 in 2017.
Applying behavioural science to marketing: Richard Shotton
Richard is the author of The Choice Factory – a best- selling book on how to apply findings from behavioural science to advertising. He shared his perspective on some behaviours and psychological shortcuts that drive consumer decisions
EAST is an effective framework for organising the many biases and making it easier for them to be applied: Easy, Attractive, Social, Timely
Make it Timely: the context in which a message is received has a proven impact on people’s resulting actions or opinions:
One psychological study found that people were more likely change their opinion messages when they were partially distracted because they aren’t focusing on putting up barriers
Make it attractive: we tend to notice what is distinctive:
The academic evidence for this, dates back to 1933 with a research study by Hedwig von Restorff. She gave participants a long list of text: it consisted of random strings of three letters interrupted by one set of three digits. So, for example: jrm, tws, als, huk, bnm, 153, fdy. After a short pause the participants were asked to remember the items. The results showed that items that stood out, in this case the three digits, were most recalled.
The Pratfall Effect is the phenomenon whereby flaws make people and products more attractive – brought to life most effectively in advertising by the ‘Hans Brinker Budget hotel’ in Amsterdam!
The panel session
In the panel session hosted by Sarah Jones, Les, Peter and
Richard were joined by Jane Christian, Head of Business Science
at MediaCom, and Steve Pollack, Nestle UK’s Head of
Media Communications.
We discussed…
The power of TV in driving both long and short-term effectiveness
The need to plan based on what you know works, rather than ‘trajectory planning’ based on what you think might work
Whether social is capable of building brands
The ability of newer channels to be effective at lower spend levels vs. TV’s ability to scale
The benefit of reaching people in groups to influence behaviour
Thinkbox’s new ‘Demand generation’ research, which has been launched with a tool that can provide brands with an optimal media mix based on a pool of 50 advertisers across group M agencies