Sue Elms – ‘Forget EMU, It’s Ad Effectiveness That Counts In Europe ‘
Sue Elms, managing director, Initiative Media
1. Introduction
The subject of this speech is the value of ad effectiveness as a measure of accountability in media.
The bit about EMU is, I think, some sort of MRG committee pun about efforts for European Media Research harmonisation. The point being that we should shelve our efforts in this area because, in the longer term it will be ad effectiveness research that really counts. Unless Hugh Johnson’s brother-in-law is Rod Hull or something.
We cannot shelve efforts to harmonise media research systems. Indeed in most markets around the world we are absolutely committed to media exposure research as the foundation stone for our business transactions.
But having watched the significant worldwide developments in the way media people are using ad effectiveness research, I am certain that the future will involve all media practitioners taking more account of this.
The opportunities for media people to plan, buy and make themselves accountable against consumer response are so obvious that it is possible to see a future where it is the primary way in which work.
What fascinates me is how different people’s attitudes are in different countries. I love the careful approach we take on this issue in the UK – all very scientific and verified to death. But sometimes this stifles creativity, we’re all a bit scared to stick our necks out because we know someone out there will try to shoot us down. I love the pragmatic approach of the Dutch, they are methodologically sound, but they seem to be able to hit on beautifully simple approaches – I have an example to show you later. I love Indonesia where ratings run at thousands and spontaneous awareness for advertising runs at 60-70% – making a mockery of some of the traditional concepts of “effectiveness”. Research costs there are really cheap and they have a great “suck it and see” attitude for experimentation. And finally, I adore Mexico, it’s a great place for a holiday…
So today I’d like to whiz through a number of points about this subject. I’d like to clarify where effectiveness research comes into it’s own whatever country you are in, I’d like to prove how important and practical it is, I should acknowledge the difficulties so that you don’t think I am naive and stupid and finally I’d like to suggest where we all fit into the picture. At the very least, I will leave everyone here with the confidence to grasp this particular nettle for themselves – especially after you’ve heard all the nonsense I’m about to say.
We all know of times when ad effectiveness research, like a knight in shining armour (with a Millward Brown logo on his shield perhaps?) has come along, clipboard or CAPI machine in hand and saved the day.
Was it good for you? I have some examples of how good it was for me.
I have faced a number of client questions to which traditional media research has provided un-fulfilling answers. But a bit of ad effectiveness research has done the trick, leaving both myself and my clients quite satisfied, if a bit flushed.
Lets look at three issues and examples.
It is possible to speak to the consumer through many communication channels. We have both to find ways to value and justify the role of advertising itself in the context of all this and also evaluate the role of each media option and choices within that option.
Each media choice, if it is measured, is done so in isolation and in different ways. Through media research we have no true comparison of worth and we can also only use judgment to derive net worth.
So for TV and radio for instance, we have separate media exposure surveys, working in different ways and some difficulty to compare or link them.
But purposeful experimentation and a simple tracking approach helped us put a per £ value on TV compared with radio for awareness building.
This is just one set of results that show the benefit of adding radio to a TV schedule. But beyond this, were we able to see the benefit of using radio alone, TV alone, the net effect of radio and TV together and even the value of different radio dayparts. So we cut to the chase. Rather than constructing dodgy net reach models to estimate media exposure value we looked at the thing we really wanted to find out – how consumers responded to the potential strategies.
A further problem with media research is its ability to measure media exposure in a fragmenting world.
As a second example: how do you measure the value of a TV channel where ratings are small, less accurate, less detailed, unrepresentative of the viewing universe? Perhaps by testing the ad effectiveness of brand using that channel? Looking at differences in response among channel users and nonusers helps.
A study we did tested the value of MTV for certain brands and highlighted the value of the channel over traditional TV options. The method is easy to transfer into other markets where audiences are not even measured or reported to create our own harmonised media value currency. It’s so easy to do when there is no existing baggage.
Now lets continue this European slant.
It is already hard to compare media in one country. It is also getting harder and harder to measure one media in one country. Now add comparison across countries!
Keeping media harmonization running at the same rate as the changes in the environment? Some people will go mad with it.
There are too many imponderables. It will become too bewildering. Unless you look at advertising effectiveness of course. By cutting through, carrying less baggage, and looking at the end result, we reach safer ground.
Many UK companies are now working with consumer response tracking data in a far more media-oriented way. At the last MRG conference you saw how modelling media exposure and tracking data for awareness can be done and how it can improve media decisions – I refer to a paper given by CIA and MwB about FORCE modelling.
With my third “knight in shining armour” example, I’d like to remind you of what this sort of thing looks like and bring to your attention that it can be done in any country.
In this example, response means advertising awareness and the market we are looking at is an item frequently purchased by women in Sweden.
Modelling of this brand and other brands in the same market gave us a good idea of how advertising might work in the future, separating the creative and media effects, and has helped us make recommendations that get better value for our client’s money.
For instance, our client has asked us what weight they should relaunch at and when they should go into the maintenance phase thereafter. We advised them that they could reduce weight on their next launch because last time we saw the very high response that we think is characteristic of the consumers in this marketplace. However, we said they should immediately start the maintenance phase because the decay was pretty quick early on.
Now that the work is done and continually updated, for the most part we know how their ads will perform and can recommend the right media deployment through the year; we also know the additional response achieved by a combination of TV ad and TV promotion which is also recommended as a feature of their next launch.
We are now working with our client and research company to improve the “raw material” for effectiveness evaluation as the data I have shown you is simply “off the shelf” tracking and we hope to use the research money more effectively, for instance by investing in pre-tests.
This sort of work can cut right across the issue of market harmonization. As long as the tracking is conducted in the same way by country, you have a common currency.
You can relate consumer response results back to the indigenous Reach and Frequency measurements for different countries even though they may not be harmonized themselves. You will then plan for a measure of consumer response and simply use the local media research results as a local mechanism or currency for achieving the required response.
2. The Importance of Response Data
Response data has always been available, but it has certainly not been fully utilized. The current media environment, in its complexity, is naturally pushing us towards a radical rethink of what we can have, what we cannot have and what we really need. Fine-tuning and developing the way we use ad effectiveness data will be seen as useful and practical thinking, making it an integral part of every plan.
Response data is coming into its own.
– It will make us more accountable
– It takes us further up the ladder of client influence
Imagine that we can promise never to over-spend in order to reach a desired consumer response, that we can provide weekly reports of our activities that are actually interesting, that we can provide “next step” media plans that actually mean something to our clients!
Things are moving already and fast.
(Many businesses have been doing it for years. Others have been forced to consider different approaches as the media marketplace changes into something where traditional methodology seems no longer justified. Still more have been persuaded that finally something theoretical has every prospect of being turned into something totally practical.)
Our business thrives on examining the alternative ways of managing the way we work. Many practitioners are well on the way to a system when consumer response, rather than media exposure data lead the media planning process.
3. Buying “Response” not ratings.
With my promised Dutch example, I want to show you this in action and convince you that it could become reality.
In the Netherlands we were asked to launch a brand against an awareness target for all adults. At the time no one knew who would be the most responsive to the brand or to the advertising, so we were asked to achieve 60% awareness among both younger and older sectors of all adults and then stop spending.
We achieved this via a beautifully simple technique. We made an arrangement with a research company who used the CAPI technology to conduct tracking fieldwork and electronically report back the past week’s awareness results to us each Monday morning.
Each Monday, we reviewed progress among our two groups and re arranged our ad schedules where necessary to reach the targets set.
Across all adults, we did achieve a steady build up to 60% awareness, but this graph shows how different this was by target audience. You will see that awareness among the younger people (the red line) grew far more rapidly than the older people (the green line) . We had seen this immediately and switched the airtime to different programs in an attempt to redress this balance (the blue bar shows our increasing panic as we switched our GRP efforts to older people). The key point is that if we had not seen the response among younger people so soon we would have dramatically overspent in the more expensive youth programmes.
4. The Difficulties Ahead
I don’t underestimate the difficulties ahead.
- We need to determine the right measures of effectiveness and they won’t be the same for everyone
- We need to build models and conduct experiments that give us knowledge of influences
- We need to track the performance over time and find fast ways to respond to it and report the results
- We need to isolate the effects of different communication channels and the way we use them
- We need to get our definitions right e.g. what exactly do we mean by wearout and recency?
5. Methodology and where media fits in
The correct effectiveness model for a brand must be decided. There are many on the market and here a just a few:
MwB Brand dynamics, a GfK model dug up from my archives and an RSGB conversion model
We need to remind ourselves that response passes through various Ievels, but we need to determine which of the levels really means something to the brand task and target audience in question and which of the levels are most useful to us for effective media planning. Think back to Indonesia.
The creative and media aspects of the operation are intertwined. But we are concerned with the effectiveness of our media decisions and therefore we need to separate them as much as possible despite the fact that that this is becoming increasingly difficult.
(The process we use must lead us to a better understanding of which communication channel works the best, and how to use each media opportunity in terms of targeting, weight, reach and frequency, timing.)
Traditional media exposure data appears at the bottom level of all these models – or not at all! It is the obvious and easiest divider of media and creative influence.
To move onto the ladder of consumer response, but maintain this split, encourages us to move to an even more definite measure of media exposure. “Ad Recognition” in this context is seen as a very smart measure. It can discriminate between different communication channels without confusion and, by lessening the reliance on likeability and memory, it can filter out the creative effect.
However, is this approach weak? After one exposure a person can probably recognise an ad and long after the exposure is “forgotten”, they can recall it again when prompted with the material itself. But does this mean the campaign is going to work? Does the fast response and slow decay have a dangerous knock on effect of lessening media weight and continuity?
Such criticism moves us further up the ladder of response towards levels of stronger commitment. Neglecting to explore ad awareness itself can be taken to be irresponsible. It is a stronger measure as the memory will be affected by different levels of frequency and different types of ad. Once properly harnessed the effect on the media plan will be deeply felt.
Are we certain that psychological measures will translate into a brand commitment that leads to sales?
Maybe maintenance brands could require that we simply maintain recent advertising awareness. But for launches, re-launches, re-positioning we would have to get involved with the deeper levels of effectiveness measurement, requiring that we move the current brand and competition “commitment levels”.
6. The Media Researcher
I am not anti media research. I have outlined the difficulties of the ad effectiveness route and you will see how I always talk about consumer response to media exposure, thus continually implying some form of media exposure measurement even if it is looser and more probability based.
I believe that media research gives us vital information about a medium’s chance to be effective (e.g. its reach and its profile) but maybe we need to let it off the hook as the only way we can be accountable in the future.
If it hasn’t happened to you already, the current media researchers role must be expanded. We must find ways of coping with less hard data in the future and the sort of data that requires greater interpretation skills.
(I personally believe media agencies are best placed to do this because we have no axe to grind regarding the creative work. They can provide a clear headed, unemotional approach. Their job can easily adapt – and in many cases it has already – to offer up stream strategic advice in a way very threatening to account planners and full service agencies. The full service agencies should counteract this by copying the Burnett idea of breaking away a “Brand Consultancy” service and by working harder on the issue of identifying useful media effectiveness measures.)
7. Conclusion
In conclusion, we need to develop a wider vision. Concentrating too much on seamless independent measurement systems, however harmonised, is a mistake – their very independence from the whole is their greatest weakness.
We need to construct new programmes that cut through the difficulties inevitably occurring in a market that becomes too complex and multi-layered for traditional solutions. (Given that I have limited money and time, I personally would trade some of the detailed audience data for more effectiveness research.)
As often is the case with innovation, the basic material is hidden in plain sight. Account planners and marketing managers have been working with response data for years. Many agencies and media companies have too. If we all bring ourselves to the same level of familiarity with that data I believe new, strong methods of accountability will emerge and develop as a result.
Let me finish by saying that we should not be phased by the plethora of theories surrounding ad-response. We should sit with our clients and research companies and work out a brand-specific solution that improves our ability to maximise value for money in their media usage. There is no single method that fits all – you must find your own knight in shining armour.
Like most things, there will be people who applaud the incisiveness of your thinking and others who sniff at your stupidity. Just imagine the real bright yellow EMU bird grabbing them by the throat and bringing them back to earth with an unceremonious thump.