Pricking the efficiency bubble
There is an unconscious bias in adland that assumes the goal of marketing is merely to ‘optimise’. It is high time we prick this idea once and for all, writes BBH’s Richard Madden
I hate my colleague Will Lion. Not only is he a brilliant planner. (His paper for Audi took the Grand Prix in last year’s IPA Effectiveness Awards.) He is also a brilliant phrase maker.
He recently put a name to a phenomenon that we in advertising have been living with for much of the last decade. He calls it ‘The Efficiency Bubble’. I’m sure Will would describe it more eloquently himself, but I would explain it as an unconscious bias that the goal of our craft is merely to ‘optimise’.
Once the phenomenon has been pointed out to you, you see it everywhere. In the programmatic approach to media, which promises greater relevance and creative potential, but in the end is mostly used only to reduce cost per impression. And in the elimination of every kind of friction (including the positive kind we used to call ‘ideas’) from the journeys by which customers experience our brands.
It was this kind of thinking, or rather the lack of it, that resulted in ads for 4x4s being placed next to online propaganda for ISIS. True, ISIS is a prolific user of 4×4 vehicles, but I doubt that thought was what was in the mind of the algorithm that decided to place the advertiser’s messages there. The concept of ‘brand damage’ was born.
The notion that all impressions are equal took a bit of a blow from this, but soon media buyers put protocols in place in avoid such incidents in future. The words ‘Brand Safe’ started appearing in media recommendations in the same way the phrase ‘Not tested on animals’ appears on cosmetics labels.
Which is a shame. Because when ‘safe’ is the best a media company can say about a recommendation, it’s somewhat akin to a brand’s R&D department promising its latest product is unlikely to explode in the customer’s hand. Is damage prevention really the highest quality we should be aspiring to for our brands?
Living in the efficiency bubble means you tend to know the price of everything but that you are, shall we say, less mindful of the value of anything. And that applies to impressions in particular. If one medium delivers a CPM 25% lower than another, it’s bound to be more cost-effective than its rival, isn’t it?
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In fact, when it comes to newsbrands, the evidence suggests quite the opposite. Across the internet, just because an ad is viewable, it doesn’t necessarily mean it gets viewed by the reader. Research by GroupM reveals that 81% of the ads in a newsbrand are seen as opposed to just 52% of identical ones that that appear elsewhere.
This difference in what might be called ‘effective viewability’ means that in terms of impressions, ads bought in newsbrands are actually 42% more cost-effective than those bought on the open exchange.
Being seen is a pretty basic requirement of effective advertising. Being remembered is pretty important too. The same research shows that ads in newsbrands are 19% more likely to be remembered than those placed elsewhere.
However, where the evidence gets really interesting (to me, at least) is when you consider the quality of the interactions people have with ads in newsbrands. This is where the effectiveness impact of context really begins to count. Research by Neuro-Insight shows that readers are 50% more engaged when they’re viewing a newsbrand ad than while they’re browsing elsewhere.
The key to this is personal relevance. You’ve deliberately chosen to spend time with content that reflects your own interests (and yes, let’s face it, your biases). So, you’re more likely to be more rationally engaged with what’s on the screen, and thus more likely to associate yourself with the ads you see there.
For a long time, we believed that newsbrand advertising operated only in the rational domain. However, the same research shows that viewing a newsbrand is a 25% more emotionally intense experience than general browsing. Neuroscience tells us that this leads to better long-term memory encoding. Which, as Byron Sharp has convincingly argued, is ultimately the key to brand growth.
Facts such as these are welcome grist to the mill of those of us who believe it is high time that advertising’s ‘Efficiency Bubble’ is pricked once and for all. Whether we like Will Lion or not.
By Richard Madden, group strategy director and partner, BBH.