Ad tracking as a tool of effective campaign planning

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Ad tracking as a tool of effective campaign
planning
Presentation for Rusbrand Seminar. September 23,
2004

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Recent developments of media caused high
attention to the problem of advertising
effectiveness

• Media inflation
• Advertising clutter
• Fragmentation of media, dispersion of audiences
• Decreasing attention to advertising
• This drew a real interest to advertising and
  media research
• To have better vision of where the brands stand
  in each moment and to react accordingly
• To have better understanding of what does and
  what does not work and to use this in future
  planning

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The most comprehensive and informative type of
such research is continuous ad tracking

• Face-to-face interviews run on a weekly basis
  (normally all 52 weeks of the year)
• Representative sample is built according to the
  rolling method giving up to 800 monthly sample
  size
• Representing national population or several
  biggest Russian cities
• Big questionnaire covering wide circle of brand
  health indicators (average interview length is
  40-45 minutes)
• Awareness, disposition, consumption
• Brand image and product quality attitudes
• Advertising recall - awareness of particular
  campaigns, main message outtake and its influence
  on purchase intention

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Key idea of the research is to track how ad
message is retranslated into consumer action
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Directions of tracking data usage

• Influence of TV strategies (schedule consistency)
  on key brand indicators (awareness and
  consumption)
• Effects of different communications on brand
  performance (awareness, imagery, consumer
  profile)
• Message perception and wear out
• Effective frequency
• Message lifecycle
• Modeling and forecasting future campaign results

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All this enables us to work out criteria of
advertising and media effectiveness

• It can be approached in two ways
• Communication returns (ad effect on awareness,
  attitude and pre-disposition)
• Business returns (ad effect on sales) - tracking
  reflects the claimed purchase actions and can
  only relatively used as sales indicator
• Communication effectiveness can be measured at
  several levels
• General (total advertising and brand awareness)
• Campaign (recognition of a particular campaign)
• Message (understanding main idea of the campaign)
• Deepest (conversion into brand attitudes and
  disposition)

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Ad campaigns may work differently at each of
effectiveness levels depending on the stage of
brand development

• New brand campaigns (unaided brand awareness
  below 10) are mostly effective at all levels
• Difference may be in the speed of growth
• Established brand campaigns (unaided brand
  awareness above 40) have slower effects at most
  of the levels, and require efforts and time to
  produce significant changes
• Developing brand campaigns (unaided brand
  awareness is between 10-40) may have different
  effects at different levels depending on strategy
  and execution

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Some conclusions

• Role of media is different at different
  effectiveness levels
• More direct at general effectiveness level
  (advertising awareness, campaign recognition,
  brand awareness)
• Deeper levels (message out-take, brand image,
  disposition) are more influenced by message
  execution
• Some factors may be influenced by other marketing
  activities (e.g. Top of Mind Brand awareness)
• Thus, if general campaign KPIs can be influenced
  by volumes of media activity, the final consumer
  pre-disposition is a result of message perception
• If the TVC has not enough branding or does not
  clearly express brand role, even 5000 GRP wont
  help

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Building effective media campaign

• Effective media planning is not a subject of GRP
  or SOV
• Clutter in Russia is so high, that a real SOV
  advantage is hardly achievable
• And most of our cases showed, that even general
  brand KPIs are not a function of SOV
• Objective of effective media planning is to
  provide an optimum frequency level to be
  generated within optimum period of time according
  to the specifics of message execution
  (complexity, branding level etc.)
• This requires understanding of how different
  messages and executions may work

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Modeling message patterns

• Ad tracking gives wide opportunities to study
  different message patterns regarding their
  effectiveness at different levels
• Based on this knowledge we can forecast future
  campaign results and even optimise them
  allocating the exactly required resources
• This allows to avoid over-spends in extra GRPs,
  weeks etc
• This may also influence effectiveness of creative
  work .

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Finally, effective campaign is a result of close
cooperation of all parties in communication
planning process
The right targeting
The right message
The right channel
The right execution
The right frequency