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When Brands Go Dark, Extending the Evidence

• Posted: June 1, 2023

This research replicates a 2021 study by Nicole Hartnett and colleagues who had analyzed what happens to sales when brands stop advertising for a year or longer. The difference in this new work is not only its focus on the impact of going dark on market share, but its use of much more extensive data, with farther-reaching conclusions and future research recommendations. It adds robustness to the prior evidence that when brands stop advertising, declines become more common and more significant, on average, as time increases.

Crisis and Opportunity – The Future of Media for Research and Measurement

• Posted: June 1, 2023

Brian Wieser’s keynote address covered four trends that are affecting the media and advertising industries: industry consolidation, the rise of ad-free TV, the emergence of new e-commerce marketers and procurement. After his presentation, Scott McDonald probed him further about his observations about the state of the media and advertising marketplace in 2023. His key points on these four trends and highlights of Brian’s conversation with Scott appear below.

JAR Best Paper 2022 Winners

• Posted: May 11, 2023

“How Advertising Expenditures Affect Consumers’ Perceptions of Quality”, was voted best JAR paper of 2022. Read more »

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When Brands Go Dark, Extending the Evidence

Nicole Hartnett, Ph.D – Senior Marketing Scientist, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute

This research replicates a 2021 study by Nicole Hartnett and colleagues who had analyzed what happens to sales when brands stop advertising for a year or longer. The difference in this new work is not only its focus on the impact of going dark on market share, but its use of much more extensive data, with farther-reaching conclusions and future research recommendations. It adds robustness to the prior evidence that when brands stop advertising, declines become more common and more significant, on average, as time increases. Whereas the 2021 study’s data were for a single product category — alcoholic beverages in Australia (bulk keg sales to bars and pubs and units sold by specialty alcohol retailers) — the 2023 data span 22 consumer goods categories and 365 brands sold widely in supermarkets in the U.S. Both studies look at brand size and prior trajectory conditions but the 2023 research adds whether the relationship between market share change and advertising cessation holds across product categories. Ultimately practitioners can use this work as a baseline to determine the possible effects of stopping advertising when advertising cuts are required, and as input into business cases to keep their ad budgets.

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AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023

The ARF hosted its annual flagship conference, AUDIENCExSCIENCE 2023, on April 25-26, 2023. The industry’s biggest names and brightest minds came together to share new insights on the impact of changing consumer behavior on brands, insights into TV consumption, campaign measurement and effectiveness, whether all impressions are equal, join-up solutions across multiple media, the validity, reliability and predictive power of Attention measures, targeting diverse audiences, privacy’s effect on advertising and the impact of advertising in new formats. Keynotes were presented by Tim Hwang, author of Subprime Attention Crisis, Robert L. Santos of the U.S. Census Bureau, Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, LLC and Andrea Zapata of Warner Bros. Discovery.

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Research-Based Marketing in Uncertain Times

• Posted: December 1, 2022

Is there research that can help marketers navigate today’s unpredictable environment?  At this event, experts recommended focusing on pricing and rethinking the “don’t go dark” rule, but they disagreed on which measures are best for optimizing marketing plans and their impact.

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Performance Pressures?

• Posted: December 1, 2022

A survey among marketers conducted for the WARC Marketer’s Toolkit 2023, shows that almost half plan to increase their investment in performance, while less than a third plan increased branding spend. However, that is only part of the story. Read more »

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

Attribution & Analytics Accelerator 2022

The boldest and brightest minds joined us November 14 - 17 for Attribution & Analytics Accelerator 2022—the only event focused exclusively on attribution, marketing mix models, in-market testing and the science of marketing performance measurement. Experts led discussions to answer some of the industry’s most pressing questions and shared new innovations that can bring growth to your organization.

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Evidence-Based Research for Effective Marketing

On November 9, 2022, industry leaders joined us to share highlights from EffWorks Global 2022 — a week-long celebration of the best new thinking and evidence-based decision-making research for marketing effectiveness. Topics of discussion included: marketing in the post-Covid economy, effective advertising in unprecedented times, the value of Share of Voice/Share of Attention/Share of Search in terms of effectiveness and commercial decision making, and more.

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• Research & Data Quality
• Article

A Guide to Validating Marketing Performance Models

Over the last dozen years, marketers have seen numerous analytical models surface to help guide data driven decision-making. Yet, many remain unsure of how trustworthy such models are. That’s why the Attribution Working Group of the ARF Cross-Platform Measurement Council put together this guidebook to help arm all stakeholders with a basic understanding of marketing performance model validation issues. This paper includes a set of considerations and questions that encourage and facilitate dialog between end clients and model providers about the performance of marketing performance models.

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