News You Can Use

A weekly round-up of the industry’s top stories and research curated by the ARF.

How Advertising Works/ARF Original Research – The Creative Impact of Context Effects

  • Posted: June 29, 2017

Horst Stipp (ARF) and Duane Varan (Media Science)

In this “deep dive” session, building on the How Advertising Works Today presentation on the Conference stage, Duane Varan presented the findings from a new original ARF research project.

Duane stated that the issue of context effects has grown in importance, especially in light of programmatic buying which often discounts such effects. Further, Duane thinks that industry research has limited utility and that the academic literature on this subject is weak.

This lack of systematic research, the inconsistent body of literature and the industry’s failure to analyze the reasons for these differences has made reaching conclusions difficult and calls for more research.

Research questions considered in this new study by Media Science:

  1. Are certain emotional states (as elicited by content) better or worse for the ads that follow?
  2. Do ads benefit from being aligned with the emotional drivers of the context they are placed in?

Phase 1 examined emotional transfer effects. Participants were exposed to program clips eliciting specific emotions (neutral, humor, thinking, sadness, fear, excitement, surprise).

Each clip was then followed by one of 7 rotated ads:

This experiment confirmed that there is contextual transfer: ad perceptions are likely to be affected by the content. However, the impact may, or may not be positive. For example, in this study ads following humor were liked more but recalled less.

Phase 2 examined emotional alignment effects. Participants were exposed to ads with either an emotionally aligned or a misaligned context. The study thus explored, for example, what is the impact of a funny program on a funny ad compared with an ad that was not funny?

The experiment confirmed that alignment can boost the impact of a commercial, but it challenges “the universal alignment argument.” The study found that sentimental, storytelling ads in similar programs benefitted from alignment. In contrast, in this study, funny commercials in funny programs failed to benefit from the alignment.

Duane reminded the audience that additional research is needed. He pointed out that this is a complex issue with a lot of variability. Alignment does work, but the effects are specific and vary considerably by program/ad content match.

Everybody Needs Good Neighbors (How Prior Ads Impact Effectiveness)

  • Posted: June 29, 2017

Michael Sankey (Forethought) and Mark Truss (JWT)

Their research examined the effect of other advertising on an ad for a CPG brand.

Looking at political ads, the researchers had found them to generate negative emotions in viewers regardless whether they were positive or negative ads. Emotional priming led to a negative impact on viewers’ reception of subsequent brand advertising, i.e. viewers rated the brand’s reputation, product performance, and value lower.

Extending this to other brand ads, an ad for an insurance company that generated negative emotion was found to negatively impact subsequent evaluations of the CPG brand.

Summarizing the findings and implications of this work:

  • The context in which an ad is viewed must not be ignored.
  • Advertisers should consider putting distance between their ad and other negative ads (e.g. political) in their media buy. Or go for the first position in the pod.
  • When pre-testing creative, ensure the context in which the ad is seen aligns to the actual media context in which the ad will be viewed.

Highlights from our Interviews with Leaders from Cannes, Part 1

  • Posted: June 29, 2017

Marc Rappin (ARF)

From Dawn Hudson (CEO, The NFL)
“AI is going to be game changer for the NFL. We have to find the right uses and applications and those that do will have key first mover advantage.

Yet as much as marketing is changing, core fundamentals are consistent. Understand your current fan and how best to keep them engaged. Look to grow your audience and how best to draw them in.”

From Keith Weed (Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Unilever)
Also, keeping Weed up at night are creativity related questions.

“To break through the clutter and get noticed has never been so hard,” says Weed.

“As a solution, Unilever is approaching brand stories differently by incorporating broader messages into its campaigns. Rather than list the product advantages, for instance, a Seventh Generation campaign features comedian Maya Rudolph singing a humorous jingle about chemicals in feminine products. People want to care about things rather than sell a product”, Weed explains.

Unilever is also experimenting with Amazon’s Alexa on voice messaging. “What does Hellmann’s mayonnaise sound like?” he wonders.

Full blog postings for all of the interviews are available on the ARF website.

Art Institute of Chicago wins Cannes Grand Prix

  • Posted: June 29, 2017

Via WARC.

“Van Gogh’s Bedrooms”, a campaign from the Art Institute of Chicago created by Leo Burnett Chicago, took the Grand Prix in the Creative Effectiveness category.

The exhibition was notable for marking the first time that art-lovers in North America could see three paintings which Vincent Van Gogh made of his bedroom in the same place. “It’s one exhibition, in one building, in one city, and yet it created a huge global conversation. And that conversation created incremental attendance of 133,000 visitors,” said Jonathan Mildenhall, the President of the Creative Effectiveness jury, and Chief Marketing Officer at Airbnb.

Moreover, he suggested, the campaign’s “fantastic, exquisite” display of creative craft drove short- and long-term revenue for the cultural institution.

“But the most important thing, for us, is it was using creativity to introduce a broader and younger demographic to the Art Institute of Chicago”, Mildenhall added.

One of five Golds handed out in the category went to the Swedish Tourist Association’s “The Swedish Number”, which let people across the globe call a single phone number and be connected to one of the many Swedes who volunteered to take part as ambassadors for the country.

Elsewhere, “The McWhopper Proposal” from Burger King claimed Gold for a marketing effort which asked McDonald’s, traditionally a fierce rival, to consider creating a combination of their respective iconic burgers.

The other Gold winners were “Man Boobs for Boobs” from MACMA in Argentina, Ariel’s “Share the Load” campaign in India, and Bajaj Auto’s “The Nation’s Bike”, also from India.

Access full article.

From the ARF Audience Measurement Stage

  • Posted: June 23, 2017

Jonathan Steuer – Chief Research Officer, Omnicom Media Group

“What I would love from all of you data and research methodology sellers is something like the food information – and nutrition information – labels about what’s in your research product: What’s in your data, where did you collect it, and what did it get matched to?”

Steuer said “providing more disclosure and more sunshine would be invaluable to brand custodians, who are hungry for insight but currently unsure about the quality of the numbers they receive.”

“You have to really dig to figure out what’s in there, and then you still don’t know if it’s true, because there’s no way to test it. So, please, tell us what’s in there at a high level of detail so we know whether we can bet on it or not, because that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

“One of the huge mistakes on the digital-side has always been taking at face value the kinds of targeting data … and trying to take that all the way to the bank without properly vetting it, and without knowing for sure what you were doing was fully baked.”

“The risk of fulfilling the marketing prophecy of garbage in, garbage out should encourage agencies and clients to take a proactive stance in this area. But that is not the only issue to worry about. In fact, the most dangerous situation is the one where you use garbage data and it works anyway, because then you don’t even get to find out why it worked. It’s why the test and control is really, really important.”

Opinion/Commentary: Big Data’s Dirty Little Secret: Why Cleaning Up Set-Top Box Data Is Not Optional

  • Posted: June 23, 2017

via Broadcasting & Cable
(source: Kelly Abcarian – SVP, Nielsen Product Leadership & Molly Poppie – SVP, Nielsen Data Science)

The race is on to understand identity across both TV and digital, and when it comes to using big data to understand audiences, there is no such thing as perfect information. The biggest misconception today is that set-top box data represents the universe of actual TV viewing behavior. In reality, it’s far from it, and we must first ask ourselves if this data even represents true-person’s behavior.

Read more »

Connected Consumers Enjoy More Than Just Digital

  • Posted: June 21, 2017

via Kantar

The Kantar DIMENSION report is an analysis of 5,213 connected adults (ages 18+) across the U.S., Brazil, China, France and the UK. Connected adults in this study are defined as those who have access to the internet via both a PC/laptop (at home or work) and a personally owned smartphone or tablet.

According to the survey, traditional media isn’t going away. Indeed, almost half of the “connected adults” we surveyed stated that while they access online media forms at least once a day, they are also reading, viewing and listening to media via their established formats.

97% reported that they watch TV on a TV set, mirroring the dominance of the established format that is observed repeatedly in audience measurement studies all over the world. This is not to suggest that our sample never view TV on any other device. 73% of them say they view TV online and 70% of them do so via a mobile device, but they also still access the medium through the TV set. It’s an ‘and’ not an ‘or’.

Print tells a similar ‘and’ story. 83% say they read news and articles in printed newspapers, while 84% read magazines in print.

These consumers are however also accessing news and articles online. Indeed, 93% read articles online and 84% on mobile devices – an indication of the ubiquity of smartphones and of their growing importance to advertisers.

71% of consumers surveyed agree that they sometimes see the same ad over and over again and that it gets too repetitive. In the U.S. specifically, 27% say they always use ad blocker software.

In comparison, 75% of those surveyed had positive attitudes towards offline advertising – agreeing that they like it generally and it can be enjoyable. 80% of the connected adults surveyed say they tolerate or generally like ads within printed newspapers.

Read entire article on Kantar >>

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