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What Makes a Successful TV Ad?

  • Steven Bellman, Magda Nenycz-Thiel, Rachel Kennedy, Bruce McColl, Laurent Larguinat, and Duane Varan
  • JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH
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Summary

Can certain neurological measures—in particular, biometrics—be used to identify television advertisements that successfully lead to sales? The researchers—from academia and industry—used direct measures of what they believe “matters most to marketers: in-market sales response (from single-source data).” Their dataset—to the authors’ knowledge the largest at that time—consisted of more than 100 CPG ads for 20 Mars, Inc., brands, combined with laboratory testing from more than 1,000 respondents.

STEVEN BELLMAN is the MediaScience research professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia. His research on media and advertising responses is funded by the Beyond:30 project, whose sponsors include television networks and advertisers worldwide. He is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Journal of Interactive Marketing and was a coauthor of the Journal of Advertising Research‘s 2015 Best Academic Paper with Duane Varan.

MAGDA NENYCZ-THIEL is Mars, Inc. professor of marketing at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia. Her areas of expertise are marketing metrics, category growth, and online buying behavior. Nenycz-Thiel leads the Mars Marketing Laboratory’s marketing research and development effort at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, funded by Mars, Inc. Her work is published in the Journal of Business Research, Journal of Advertising Research, and other journals.

RACHEL KENNEDY is associate professor and a cofounder of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia, where she focuses on producing advertising and media knowledge to help grow brands. Her work can be found in the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Business Research, among other journals, and she is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Advertising Research, International Journal of Market Research, and International Journal of Advertising.

LAURENT LARGUINAT is the director of the Mars Marketing Laboratory, which is responsible for marketing-science research at Mars, Inc. The lab’s mandate is to collaborate with academic partners to help establish Mars as a marketing science leader within the consumer-packaged-goods industry.

BRUCE MCCOLL is industry professor at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University of South Australia. At Mars he was global chief marketing officer for ten years, through August 2016, after successive marketing roles starting in 1992. Previously, he had spent eight years in sales and marketing at Schering-Plough Research Institute. During his tenure as Mars’s chief marketing officer, the effectiveness of advertising spend increased by more than 50 percent, as measured by single-source data. The company was named Advertiser of the Year at Cannes Lion 2012 and Spikes Asia in 2016.

DUANE VARAN is chief executive officer of MediaScience, a marketing research firm with offices in Austin, TX, and Chicago. Varan also oversees Beyond:30, a collaborative industry project exploring the changing media landscape. He has been awarded the Australian Prime Minister’s University Teacher of the Year, among other accolades, and is published in the Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Communication, and Journal of Economic Psychology.