Why brands are falling short with their media strategies [REPORT]

Leading brands are using an ineffective combination of media channels for their campaigns, a major new study has found, with many optimizing for reach instead of for brand metrics that will yield more impact.

The study, from the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, concluded that current marketing practices are “far from optimal” and that brands could achieve brand lifts of 50% or more by combining different media channels against advertising goals.

As media has fragmented, more channels have emerged – such as Facebook, YouTube, online display, and online video – and this has increased complexity for advertisers and marketers. It also raises questions about how much ad spend to allocate to each. The advertising industry, the researchers of this study argue, often optimize their campaigns for reach because it’s easier to measure and because there’s a belief that all results flow from achieving high levels of it.

This approach, however, can ignore brand metrics at the expense of trying to drive sales; the most effective campaigns consider both. The study focused on the following brand metrics: association (how easily a brand is identified by a slogan or jingle, for example), aided awareness (recall of a brand with a prompt), unaided awareness, and motivation (purchase intent).

Takeaways

• Based on a Kantar dataset of 1,083 large multichannel campaigns between 2008 and 2019*, undertaken by 557 global brands in 23 major industries and 51 countries. The average media-only spend for US campaigns in the dataset was $12m.
• 80% of the campaigns studied fall near the two highest reach-efficiency scores; but only 8% of campaigns come close to the two highest efficiency bands for brand metrics.
• There is no “universal silver-bullet campaign strategy” – the concept of what’s best relies on a brand’s risk appetite and the campaign goals.
• TV in combination with online video and display (observed in 23% of campaigns) “never offers the best performance” regardless of the campaign goals, said researchers.
• The best combination for CPG brands is television, Facebook and outdoor, which is only observed in 8% of campaigns, but this combination isn’t as effective in other categories.
• Traditional and digital media can be highly complementary, indicating that their division is overblown.
• Collapsing channels into a catch-all group, such as “social media”, should be done with caution as the platforms are not equivalent.

Why it matters

Marketers and advertising professionals often grapple with the question, what combination of media will result in the most effective campaign? The answer, which won’t surprise many, is that it’s nuanced. But there is a significant amount of additional advertising power available to brands if they consider channel function as well as the intended audience.

The research – one of the largest studies of its kind – suggests that the most effective way to plan campaigns is to consider each channel in relation to the others and to optimize for brand metrics, not just for reach.

WARC’s own compilation of research into multiscreen media planning came to similar conclusions – there is no single media mix that’s best for all brand outcomes. But using more channels, and considering their individual strengths, boosts ROI and brand metrics.
Key quote

“Managers should consider the unique individual functionality of channels relative to other available channels, along with the potential for complementarity in the media plan. So, the value of a channel is not just, how many views can I buy, but also, what do I accomplish with a view?” – J Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz, and Andrew T Stephen, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

* “Beyond the Pair: Media Archetypes and Complex Channel Synergies in Advertising” studied cinema, Facebook, magazines, newspapers, online display (banners), online video, outdoor, point of sale, radio, television, and YouTube. TV is the most commonly used channel, cinema the least.
Sourced from Saïd Business School, WARC

To download report, CLICK HERE.