It’s not whether you can build a brand in digital — it’s where
Opinion
New research shows there are vast differences in the potential brand-building power of various digital ad formats, uncovering real bargains for savvy advertisers.
In advertising, we are always talking about the need to build brands in digital.
Some people think it can’t be done. Others claim it’s being done all the time.
The recent Profit Ability 2 from Thinkbox and WPP shows digital channels do deliver payback over a longer time frame than a couple of weeks, but that is about as deep as we have managed to probe.
Advertising generates profit, but not all media channels are equal
Little brand-building understanding
Brand spend around $700bn on digital advertising globally every year, but with very little detailed knowledge about the relative potential of those ads to change perceptions of brands.
Now, I understand much of digital advertising isn’t primarily concerned with brand-building. But even if just 10% of it is, then we are talking about a rudderless pot of adspend almost twice as big as the entire UK ad market.
And because there appears to be very little format- or platform-level understanding of digital media’s brand-building ability, there is also very little knowledge informing the answer to a second question: are digital advertising environments priced in line with their brand-building potential?
Clearly, with the right data, commercial opportunity for brands is waiting to be uncovered. And that is the core role of a media agency — providing a unique view on media value.
Find the bargains
New data from EssenceMediacom shows that there are vast differences in the potential brand-building power of the most popular digital advertising formats available in the UK. Consequently, it uncovers real bargains for savvy advertisers.
The journey to quantify this value began with the Signalling Success paper EssenceMediacom released in January.
Its key insight was that a media channel’s signalling strength — the ability of a media placement to improve perceptions of a brand as high-quality, trustworthy and popular — was linked to the media’s perceived price among the public.
Now EssenceMediacom is going a step deeper to try to unpick the brand-building potential of the most popular digital ad formats in the UK.
Digital media’s impact
Many would argue the best way for an advertiser to determine where impact and brand-building are happening is through its own econometrics — and they’d probably be right.
But while econometrics might tell an advertiser how much to spend within a channel, it won’t help with where. And media channels like “social” or “video” are big places.
So what happens? Agency staff buys to their deals or perhaps some isolated brand-lift study data. At best, some planners may use attention data, but building attention data that compares, in an apples-to-apples way, across so many media platforms and formats is very expensive.
This new research changes that. It represents the most comprehensive view on how digital media impacts our subconscious and therefore our perception of brands. Most importantly, it looks at the relative ability of each format to produce these brand effects, regardless of creative or brand size. It can be done quickly and at relatively little cost.
When paired with more straightforward reach and media-pricing data, this signalling data reveals significant untapped value in the media landscape, representing a major commercial opportunity for brands and their adspend. With it, we can maximise the brand-building potential of each channel investment.
Value distribution
To produce this data for the digital landscape, we took 11 popular ad formats. Respondents were shown a mocked-up ad for a fake company (Tixe, a generic telecoms brand) in each format. And each format was accompanied by a simple one-line description of the advertising experience.
Respondents were asked to rank the advertising by cost to the advertiser. Then they were asked to assume that, if their highest-priced ad cost £100, what would it cost to buy the equivalent amount of the other formats?
The resulting data allows us to build maps of how value is distributed across the landscape.
Immediately, we can see an almighty battle in the blue circle, as several popular social video ad formats all duke it out both in terms of perceived and actual cost.
Interestingly, these differences remained relatively stable across demographics, including 18-24s. This shows that, in the world of social vertical video, price is king, as all the formats on offer deliver roughly the same value to the brand.
Elsewhere, the green circle represents two identical video formats from the same provider, yet priced for serving on different device types. You can see that neither really offers a brand-building potential advantage, running contrary to what the pricing strategy implies.
Finally, in the orange circle, two very different formats on two different media brands, but usually bought as one buy from their common parent company, which touts other formats and brands as brand-building environments.
We can see that one format offers significantly more brand-building potential than the other, given their similar price points. If you’re a planner or buyer, you can immediately see how this might affect your budget allocation or price negotiation with that media owner.
Future planned tests will look at formats that sit within print (online and offline), OOH and connected TV. Some of these tests will focus on understanding the power of the format to build brand (eg. digital six-sheets vs paper and paste), while others will look at the power of the media brand (eg. a 30-second ad on Netflix vs ITVX).
Podcast: Signal strength in a changing media world, with EssenceMediacom’s Richard Kirk
Richard Kirk is chief strategy officer at EssenceMediacom UK