How is advertising working today?

Fascinating new insight from the Advertising Research Foundation at seminar with MESH clients in London MESH Experience is one of many contributors to the ARF’s $1 million study and we were honoured that Horst Stipp, PhD and Manuel Garcia-Garcia, PhD, joined a select group of our clients in London to showcase findings from this ground-breaking work. How would our UK audience react? We started with insight that had our audience nodding:

• Advertising across multiple platforms delivers incremental ROI, with digital and TV providing a kicker effect of plus 40% over other combinations. In the UK, data also indicates that with up to 6 platforms we see incremental ROI.
• 75% of ad effectiveness derives from the quality of the creative.

Then for more provocative insight from Manuel:

• Unified creative strategy across platforms enhances ad memorability, with a 60% impact if the content is customised to the platform. Sounds sensible. Yet only 38% of campaigns currently do this.  Why is that?  We all know we should be creating unified campaigns and tailoring content to the medium.  As the debate unfolded we found the practical difficulties of getting different parts of an organisation focussed on achieving this. 
• Customised mobile video ads deliver greater effectiveness than repurposed content across viewability (+53%), UX (+39%) and engagement (+49%). So don’t expect to put your TV ad onto mobile and hope that it will work effectively!  Horst posited that in future we might be making ads for mobile and repurposing for TV.  This makes a lot of sense because MESH sees how much more impactful the same TV ad is when seen on the cinema screen.

The final section of the seminar revolved around context.  The London audience knows context is king!  What the ARF brought was new evidence of WHY context is so important. The ARF context effects model has two key processes that trigger effects: Attention Transfer and Priming/Halo Effects. But what about Low Involvement Processing? Maybe the world has moved on?  The research from the ARF was pretty compelling! The more attention paid to Content, Platform, Device and Media Brand the more likely the ad is to perform better.  Nielsen shows a very strong correlation (0.81) between programme engagement and ad recall.  So if you are highly engaged with Game of Thrones you are more likely to pay attention to the ads.  Heval Ceylan-Gilchrist, MESH, had recently found engagement levels for service brands increase from 6pm onwards, particularly with posters seen during the commute when people have more time to absorb communication. 

• Aligning advertising with content can provide dramatic improvement in performance. And ads in break impact too. The ARF results highlight the dangers of programmatic advertising which privileges serving an ad to a particular person over valuing their context.

 If brands are to create compelling experiences for people and avoid ad blocking, we have a lot to learn.  Sessions like this (see video http://bit.ly/2oEbU4A) help to share best practice as people’s consumption behaviour and the media landscape evolves. Fiona Blades CEO MESH Experience