“Newspaper advertising can be about more than the latest supermarket offers”
Raymond Snoddy says the NMA’s new Creative Benchmarking for national newspaper advertising is another valuable candle in the darkness, but “in difficult times for newspapers, it is increasingly clear that there is no magic potion to cure the problem”…
It used to be almost as simple as a mathematical formula. Newspaper advertising = tactical campaigns – selling something NOW at the latest price. The medium was also obviously useful to deploy when there was a lot of data or technical information to get across.
Using newspapers for brand advertising: forget it. Brand advertising seeking to unleash a strong emotional tug. That = television.
It is a measure of the success of the Newspaper Marketing Agency over the first seven years of its existence that such primitive certainties have at least been questioned and partially undermined.
The NMA today continues on its long march to enlighten the media buying community with the unveiling of Creative Benchmarking for national newspaper advertising based on Kantar’s system for evaluating the creative impact of television commercials.
The seminar might sound more than a little esoteric – something that would only interest real marketing nerds. After all it is based firmly on TNS’ AdEvalITM Motivated/Involved measure.
Got that?
Luckily it can easily be turned into English. It’s simply a measure of the levels of motivation and involvement generated in the minds of readers by a newspaper advertisement. Factors tested include interest in the advertisement and its effect on use of brand and opinion of brand, with the whole lot being “validated” against the sales effect.
An indication that this may not all be total gobbledygook comes from the fact that the best advertisements achieve more than double the score of the weakest.
Quality and creativity is usually telling whatever the evaluation method or matrix, and the NMA have already encouraged the search for excellence in newspaper advertising by funding the annual Awards for National Newspaper Advertising – the ANNAs. The first thing any media marketing organisation has to do is fund a lavish awards ceremony. The rest is mainly intellectual window-dressing.
As for Creative Benchmarking as Maureen Duffy, the NMA chief executive, put it this evening, there are two questions about newspapers she is always asked by the marketing community.
The first is: “What makes a good newspaper ad?” This is rapidly followed by the second – have you got any examples.
By today’s kick-off of the new Creative Benchmarking system, 186 newspaper ads evaluated by the TNS AdEvalITM Motivated/Involved measure were already in the database and the plan is to add a further 12 every month.
The ads were scored on everything from impact, re-appraisal and emotional connection to call to action, depth of information links with TV and public agenda. Some of the top ten examples are very telling, such as an ad warning of the dangers of Ovarian cancer.
The Ovarian Cancer Action ad by RKCR/Y&R reminding readers of the symptoms of the disease succeeded in getting readers to stop and look and re-appraise their knowledge. It reminded 42 per cent of a TV ad and produced a “call to action” that was one third stronger than the category average and 70 per cent stronger than the average for the data base. Eighty three per cent scored the ad highly for depth of information and slightly more noted an emotional connection.
An ad for Baxter’s Healthy Minestrone – Goodness. A Healthy Soup That’s Tasty produced – the second highest call to action in the food category and 61 per cent were reminded of TV.
While on the whole good ads will always do better than bad ads at least now there is a system in place which allows convenient comparison on a rational basis. And maybe the answer to Maureen Duffy’s two most asked questions have already taken shape in the new data base.
Does any of this matter? It hardly amounts to a Eureka moment that will transform the future of the newspaper and media industries. However rigorous, honest and independent the caveat must always been entered about the research paid for and conducted for individual media marketing bodies but always have a Yes But factor.
Yes very interesting but would it ever have seen the light of day if the results had not been broadly encouraging. In this case the work is largely comparative rather than making grandiose claims about the wonders of newspaper advertising.
As such it is another valuable candle in the darkness, trying to illuminate unreasoning prejudice. In difficult times for newspapers it is increasingly clear that there is no magic potion to cure the problem.
There must be a multi-track approach – essentially experimenting with anything that might bring in future revenues to continue funding independent journalism. Charging for online is clearly one of those experiments, and the newspaper world is holding its breath on that one.
Another is to convince the media buyers that newspaper advertising can be about more than the latest supermarket offers – or as we must learn to call it Creative Benchmarking.