Billett on Effectiveness - All Comments

re: #19 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

David Brennan — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:06:49 GMT

Dear John

You make a few points here that have caused me some concern, so I wanted to send you a reply. Apologies if it’s a bit long, I wanted to post asap and didn’t have time for brevity.

Underpinning my reply is the fact that although TV is not the only effective ad medium, I can properly, rigorously prove that it does work better than any other medium, pound for pound. It creates more profit for advertisers, which is what I call effectiveness. I’ll add that multi-media campaigns work better than solus media.

I’m not sure that ad agencies have a vested interest in proving that TV works. It’s a common accusation these days but they are now so intimidated by it that many feel guilty recommending TV, despite believing in its strengths. If anything, the reverse is happening, with both creative and media agencies anxious to prove their online credentials by promoting that ahead of other media. Every agency we know takes its neutrality and responsibility to invest advertising money wisely very seriously. If you know otherwise, maybe you should name names.

I know it’s crashingly dull and makes bad copy for journalists, but perhaps the reason there is so much evidence of TV’s effectiveness is because it is effective. The most obvious answer is often the correct one. Also, the evidence that exists about TV’s effectiveness is sound, proven over time, proven across all categories, over a variety of tasks and is very robust.

It is also worth pointing out that we have all been measuring TV the wrong way to date and yet it still comes out as the most effective medium. We now know a lot more about the crucial role of emotion, the power of the implicit mind, and the way we process ads. This new knowledge makes TV’s contribution to ad effectiveness clearer and even more powerful. We still don’t measure those effects properly (via tracking studies etc.), but TV still comes out on top.

You say that TV enjoys a massive built-in bonus so it’s no surprise TV ‘works best’ because no other medium stands a chance of proving its effectiveness. But look at all the advertisers who have been reported (usually with a great fanfare) as ‘coming off’ TV. They all give other media a chance to create the same effects but almost invariably come back. TV has never been under such a spotlight – especially against the ‘accountability’ of online (which is itself proving to be fuelled by TV) – and this is partly why many of these studies have been commissioned. In the end, TV continues to stand up as the most effective ad medium, however the data is examined.

You also suggest that TV’s success might be to do with more money being spent on it, always intensively and at the start of an advertising campaign. I’d like to deal with those points separately:

According to last year’s Advertising Statistics yearbook, TV took only 20.3% of ad revenue, while print took 41% in total and newspapers alone took 25.9%. Looking at display only, newspaper advertising is very nearly as high as TV. There are plenty of campaigns where TV takes a minority of the money, but where the inclusion of TV has been proven to make a big difference to the outcome. Direct Mail at 12% and internet at 15.6% also take a significant share of marketing budgets so are not lacking in robust figures to base econometric studies on.

I’d argue that TV doesn’t take a big enough share of ad budgets when you look at its dominance within consumers’ media diets. The recent Touchpoints2 survey shows that TV occupies a vast amount more of consumers’ media time than anything else. Commercial impacts are at a record high, 11% higher than 5 years ago. TV reaches nearly 90% of the population every day in an impactful and engaging way. It’s memorable, it’s persuasive and still one of our most popular topics of conversation on- or offline. I don’t endorse splitting media budgets by amount of time given to each medium. But I do endorse robust econometrics. What on earth else should we trust?

We are not lacking in evidence about other media. Last year there were two major studies that looked at the effectiveness of all media. ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’ by Les Binet and Peter Field analysed 26 years of IPA Effectiveness Awards entries and found that campaigns which included TV were about 25% more effective than those which did not. They also found that TV is more effective today than 20 years ago. Of the campaigns analysed, around a quarter didn’t use TV as lead (and 15% didn’t use at all) and they tended to perform significantly worse than those that did; and this wasn’t econometrics but hard, market data like profit and market share.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (an econometric analysis commissioned by us, but totally impartial) looked at 706 brands in 7 markets over 10 years including plenty of non-TV users and mixed media campaigns and found that TV paid back 4.5 times the investment, more than any other medium. The PwC study also looked at brand value via conjoint – with no inherent bias towards medium used – and again TV showed the highest correlation with brand value. All the leading brand value owners had spent twice the % of their spend on TV than their competitors.

Econometrics is about analyzing sales – mostly across the course of a campaign period. These analyses show the power of TV despite its main strength not being short-term sales promotion, and despite the fact that 45% of TV’s value is generated in years 2 and 3. This attribute is missed out by econometric analyses apart from PwC’s.

TV spend comes at the start of a campaign because that is how the consumers’ brand journeys start. The phrase ‘lead medium’ is totally justified for TV. We recently launched a study with the Internet Advertising Bureau called ‘TV + Online: Better Together’ which features many consumers talking about how they were first introduced to a brand or motivated to go and find out more from TV ads. Recognition of online ads was more than doubled if people had seen the TV campaign initially – which makes sense when you think about how people receive full TV ads when they are relaxed but are always on a mission (and therefore need to make sense of an ad in moments) when they are online (or indeed reading a newspaper or magazine, driving past a poster etc.).

Almost always it is TV that starts off the process. It doesn’t mean that other media which feature later, and which can build on that interest and close the sale, aren’t incredibly important. But TV at the start makes lots of sense. We have examples of campaigns which started with other media, and the majority didn’t take off until the TV kicked in. Do get in touch if you would like me to share more.

Best,

Dave Brennan

Research & Strategy Director

Thinkbox

re: #14 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:49:16 GMT

Forgive my adding a comment to my own blog. But a good advertising friend has highlighted that my analysis is flawed on certainly one occasion. He refers me to the well established and marketing effectivenss award winning UK campaign for Andrex Toilet Tissue. For many years the brand hero and demonstrator was not a user, but a puppy dog. Well even if you wanted to use a human being as an Andrex brand demonstrator you'd be hard pushed to do so!. This just goes to prove that in marketing effectiveness there are opportunities for bucking the trend. It confirms the adage that there is so much we don't know about what we do know about marketing effectiveness

re: #16 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:21:54 GMT

Roderick White has written to say:

"As the Editor of Admap I am circulating my colleagues and connections at WARC (World Advertising Research Council) suggesting they switch on to John Billett's "25 Things we know about what we don't know.." On the evidence so far, a brilliant distillation of John's experience plus a fair amount of marketing science derived from the likes of Andrew Ehrenberg."

re: #15 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:19:19 GMT

Erwin Ephron, the distingusihed US media consultant has written

"I think your "25 Things.." are terrific.

I've forwarded them, as possible grist, to the organizers of the "Empirical Generalizations in Advertising Conference" to be held in December 2008 at The Wharton Business School in Philadelphia US".

Sterling Performance | BNET

Sterling Performance | BNET — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:43:40 GMT

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re: #11 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectivenss

Jeremy Blake — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:18:05 GMT

Great stuff thanks, a great daily dose that I joined at session #9 and will back read to catch up.

The media salespeople I train could do with learning how to educate clients with, "Media buying efficiency models can't work effectively across media types because the measures of audience contact - viewing, reading etc are totally incompatible.", the other challenge they have is when they are selling cross platform solutions and clients are measuring the effectivness of the digital campaign compared to their exhbition or print campaign. Seeing the campaign as a whole helps, and we as salespeople and marketers need to develop they knowledge and language to express the mix of understanding that people have. Your articles give us all the language we need to help us to do this.

re: #9 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

Jeremy Blake — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:02:08 GMT

I’ve just read your article on #9 of 25 things we know about etc and thought it was great which I discovered on Brand Republic.

Is there a way to get all 25 together in one document when you have finished writing them?!

I have subscribed on the bottom right on the Blogit with Billett page and look forward to the rest of the series.

Many thanks for helping me to improve my knowledge and understanding of marketing.

re: #10 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

Jeremy Blake — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:59:59 GMT

I’m glad to see the possibility of the #25 things being collated into an online/physical publication, that would be great.

I much enjoyed today’s article and it bears out some of what I’ve understood from Claude C. Hopkins on ads having an effectiveness towards new customers, rather than being used to keep existing customers.

I imagine that when he was creating campaigns during the huge growth of consumerism, particularly with domestic products and clothes that so many people could become new customers, that a particular advert could have an appeal for many years during a growth period. Your article has made me think about how this law can be applied on a far broader geographical scale.

I shall keep enjoying reading, thank you for writing them.

re: #9 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

Jeremy Blake — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:03:25 GMT

what a great article, so succinctly put too.makes me think of the 80/20 rule and how the long tail has knocked that into a cocked hat too

re: #8 of 35 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:37:43 GMT

Forgive me writing a comment on my own blog but today's (July 10th 2008)news from Stella Artois, reported in Campaign, demands it.

The front page advises that Stella Artois are running an advertising agency pitch for a lower stength, lower cost version of Stella, to aid "lagging sales". Who is running this brand? Are the lunatics in charge of the asylum? We are witnessing the death of the brand organised by people supposedly in charge of defending it. Will the agencies have the bottle to say enough is enough; we aren't pitching for this? But they could make a winner in this year's IPA advertising non-effectivenss awards

re: #4 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:50:49 GMT

Antony Young, President of Optimedia USA in New York passes on this comment "..so true John. I am enjoying these Billett pearls of wisdom"

re: #4 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

Gellan Watt — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:04:08 GMT

Come on John - my implication isn't as simple as that. I'm no slouch when it comes to research. I'm a believer of insight and testing with everything we do. What it is, is a good example of what some non-research savvy clients do that takes their strategy, brands and creative to a bad place and budgets somewhere even worse. No-one on these pages needs a lesson in what testing is. They want an opinion.

re: #4 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

John Billett — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 20:57:50 GMT

Gellan. The implication of your comment is that "testing" means measuring one campaign versus another. In these digital times that "one-versus-one" approach has been superceded by putting into the market several campaign expressions AT THE SAME TIME and then build in continuous measurement to improve and refine. Test is not a one off. Test is the means for deleivering continuous improvement in your response to consumers response to your communications.

re: #4 of 25 Things we know about what we don't know about Marketing Effectiveness

Gellan Watt — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:58:10 GMT

I agree with testing and retesting... we base all of our work on insight. BUT I have seen first hand my work and another agencies work being tested head-to-head, and mine failed badly. The client, rightly on this basis, chose the other campaign... and it bombed. Big time. Then they ran mine and it it was a huge success. But an even bigger failure for testing. The issue is this: how far do you go to test the testers and measure the measurements before you believe the results???