“Buzz” Metrics Reveal Clues about Advertising Success

Summary

Marketers should use conversation metrics, in addition to effectiveness measures, to determine whether their advertising campaigns will drive purchases—and not just around unique events like the Super Bowl, a trio of word-of-mouth experts reported. The Engagement Labs researchers found that “buzz”—upticks in both online and offline conversations about brands—contributes about equally to sales and other business outcomes. “For many Super Bowl advertisers, generating ‘buzz’—or word of mouth both online and face-to-face—is a marketing objective, but ‘buzz’ as a campaign objective should not be limited to big tent-pole events like the Super Bowl,” the authors wrote. “It should be a key objective for all advertising.” Among the takeaways:

• Conversation metrics potentially are more powerful than other indicators of advertising success, such as USA Today’s annual Super Bowl Ad Meter, which relies on consumers’ evaluation of advertisements, or viewing and sharing levels on YouTube.
• On average, 19 percent of consumer purchases can be attributed to conversations about brands occurring offline (10 percent) and online (9 percent),
• About 25 percent of advertising’s impact involves the stimulation of conversations.

The above data relationships were estimated in the authors’ earlier work that had used attribution modeling involving online and offline conversation data for brands, modeled against weekly advertising expenditure and consumer purchase data.