GfK: How to understand the Holy Grail…

Gary Roddy, research director, GfK NOP Media, on how the effective measurement of cross-media advertising can provide new opportunities for managing and planning campaigns…

Marketing is becoming more complex everyday. Brand marketers are seeking to develop new and innovative ways to advertise and sell products. Simple you say? – Not really. All these new marketing ideas need to find the correct vehicle to use and as more and more media vehicles become available this become somewhat harder. Coupled with the increasing media knowledge of consumers this is becoming more and more like searching for the Holy Grail.

So what do you do?

Do you restrict your advertising planning and implementation to those media you can measure effectively now?

Do you suffer in silence and accept the fact that the true measure of your marketing activity can never really be measured and understood?

What is the one thing that some people seem to forget? Sales!

People advertise why? Is it to build a brand or sell products?

Simply put, both.

But which of the media are working best at achieving for the advertiser the best return on investment? And wouldn’t it be great to understand how they all work together?

I think I may have seen the light – or at least been exposed to a solution working in Germany for Coca-Cola.

The plan was to understand all the benefits of the new darling of the marketing world – the Integrated Cross Media Advertising campaign. Some would describe them as the leaders of modern marketing and people believe that a cross-media campaign has an undisputed effect of the perception of the brands using it.

The synergetic effect on actual buying behaviour and ultimately sales, however, has not been measurable up to now. GfK and Coca-Cola have now analysed these effects and the interplay of all components for the first time. The results show that cross-media campaigns have a greater effect than single-media campaigns, and internet use has a direct impact on purchasing decisions.

The starting point of the survey was the Coca-Cola Christmas campaign, which featured in November and December last year on TV, cinema and radio spots, posters, print ads, internet banners, video ads and Google space. The GfK Web Efficiency Panel examined the reception of these adverts and the actual purchasing behaviour of consumers. The technology that powers this panel enables the team to track each page visited, each commercial message seen and each search result presented to the respondents. This is unlike any other software available in the market at the moment. The system logs all exposures to online marketing, including the type, position and size of activity. And beyond this, the unique feature of this project was that the full internet usage of 15,000 people were integrated with all purchases of daily essentials and the use of traditional media like TV, radio and print in these households, all collated in one source and analysed.

Cross-media significantly increases effect on sales.

The results of the survey clearly demonstrate that the interplay of the various media significantly strengthens the effects of a campaign.

For the Coca- Cola Christmas campaign, the interplay of TV advertising and the YouTube video ads proved to be the most effective on sales, with consumers – who saw the advert on TV and on YouTube within a week – demonstrating a 97% higher purchase rate.

In the individual analysis, the video ads on YouTube were shown to be as effective for sales as traditional TV spots. A further effect of internet advertising is that it generates the exclusive reach which is not possible through TV advertising. Focusing on the target age group of 14 to 39, the effects of individual media channels proved to be even greater.

The GfK Web Efficiency Panel (WEP) specializes in offering significant opportunities to the advertising-intensive consumer goods industry to optimise media planning, content-relevant group targeting and, therefore, budget allocation.

According to Coca-Cola Germany, the results show that online marketing can play an efficient role in the media mix, and the survey enabled the first cross-media monitoring which showed how the individual media categories interlock and affect short term sales. This provides new opportunities to manage and plan campaigns holistically.

So according to Coca-Cola in Germany they have found the Holy Grail or at least are some way along the path to enlightenment.

What about the rest of us? Should we still be developing measurement systems that only measure one aspect of the communication and sales process? Perhaps now is the time to work together to talk together to see the real effects of marketing using once source rather than many.