One of the most persistent point-of-view requests we get from clients concerns wearout of their advertising. Why; because ads are expensive to produce and media is costly. What we would all like to hear is that ads don’t wearout and that they will continue to drive brand sales at the same rate regardless of the spend placed behind them. But the reality is ads do wearout. They reach a stage after being seen so many times that their impact diminishes substantially. In fact that’s one of the accepted definitions of commercial wearout:

Commercial Wearout – Stage an advertisement reaches after being printed or aired so many times that its effect on the brand‘s sale is zero or even negative.

Source: businessdictionary.com

Given this reality the important question isn’t Will my ads wear out? but rather When will my ads wear out? Luckily there are a variety of marketing research tools and techniques to identify wearout points across the spectrum of media channels; TV, Digital, Radio, Print. Pre-testing, post-testing, brand health tracking and sales decomposition/market mix modeling can all be used. But regardless of the tool selected, 3 conditions must be met to properly measure wearout:

1. Execution level granularity of both sales effectiveness and media spend. The research literature abounds with evidence that wearout occurs at the individual ad level. Two ads within the same campaign can have very different levels of wearout depending on their initial sales effectiveness and media placed behind them. If the measurement approach does not take this into account, these two factors will be convoluted, resulting in misinterpretation of the data.

Take this case study as an example. The advertiser launched a campaign of three sequentially aired television ads. The green bar in the chart indicates a base period without advertising, while the blue bars indicate when the ads were on air. The dotted line represents the moving average market share which gives an indication of sales effectiveness relative to the base period.

From this view it appears that the ads hit their wearout point midway through the campaign as indicated by the moving average flattening out at the third airing period. The implication is that the ads are well overdue for replacement.

Here is the same case with a more granular view. Four-week periods replace the twelve-week ones. And instead of looking at the three ads in aggregate, each ad’s airing is indicated. This chart tells a very different wearout story. Rather than a flattening, it shows a very aggressive battle for market share, with ads B and C being particularly effective in driving gains for the brand. While ad B has been worn down substantially, ad C is still exhibiting some elasticity to sales.

In the above example it is easy to see each ad’s sales effectiveness and wearout because the ads were aired sequentially, the media plan was fairly flat with few hiatuses and the advertising was so powerful that it dwarfed other factors within the marketing mix. This is unusual, as the vast majority of campaigns include ads aired simultaneously, more varied media plans and advertising that generate more modest share changes. Because of this, even the most sophisticated market mix models can have difficulty accurately assessing wearout. A useful rule-of-thumb is that if the model cannot provide a statistically sensitive sales impacted estimate at a given GRP level (e.g., sales decomposition beta weight at 500 GRPs) for each ad unit, then the estimates of wearout are likely to be impacted by this convolution. Another caveat is that even when the data is sufficient for the model to provide reasonable estimates, oftentimes the analysis period is too long for the results to be actionable.

2. Metrics correspond to sales/share changes. An advantage of using decomposition modeling is that the connection to sales is inherent in the method. By contrast, the other research approaches use attitudinal measures (e.g., message communication, purchase intent, ad liking/enjoyment) or behavioral measures (e.g., changes in brand preference, ad/brand recall) as a stand-in for sales. Typically, attitudinal measures are ineffective in measuring wearout because the over-time relationship to sales response is weak. For example, while an ad’s ability to communicate a certain key message can be an important contributor to sales effectiveness, its ability to do so at one hundred GRPs is roughly the same as it is at five hundred GRPs.

This pattern holds true even for some behavioral metrics. The table below shows the results for 32 television ads tested before airing and then again after airing. Two behavioral metrics were investigated. One is proven ad and brand recall. In this measurement, respondents were incidentally exposed to advertising within consistent television programming and then later were queried to both describe the ad and to name the brand, thus verifying their recollection of it. The other is the CCPersuasion metric. This is the observed shift in brand preference among the competitive set given an actual acquisition opportunity (in this case a prize drawing). This is much different than attitudinal persuasion (aka purchase intent) which is simply a verbal commitment to try the product at a later date. The amount of airing randomly varied between the two tests with the minimum being 232 GRPs and the maximum 2806. The median media weight between tests was 1018.

The first thing to note is that the recall measure showed very little variation between the pre-test and post-test regardless of the media spend level. CCPersuasion on the other hand was very sensitive to airing, with all thirty two ads showing a decline. On average, CCPersuasion lost 47% of its value between tests, with the degree of drop in direct relationship to the amount of airing. This drop in CCPersuasion level has been shown to be consistent in over one hundred and fifty cases covering one-hundred eighteen brands competing in fifty one categories.

3. Isolation from other in-market effects. One final area which impacts the ability to properly isolate wearout is variation in programming context between the measurement times. For example, if a media plan uses more expensive, higher engagement placements early in the rotation and less engaging placements later, then the drop in effectiveness seen will be a combination of wearout and the shift in placement quality. And since program engagement can vary significantly among shows with similar viewership ratings, even plans with consistent media placements will experience this variation. In-market tracking and post-testing systems are especially vulnerable to such deviations, oftentimes with ads exhibiting what appears to be a “spontaneous recovery” from wearout when in reality it is simply a shift to more engaging context.

In short, it is easy to be fooled by these factors, even coming to the conclusion that the wearout phenomenon is either unpredictable or, on the opposite side of the coin, rare or non-existent. But by employing a wearout monitoring program that avoids these pitfalls the quantification of wearout becomes as straightforward as the concept itself. And the rewards for doing so are high. In one published case our client experienced a five-fold improvement in campaign ROI just from managing wearout!

If you would like more information on managing wearout to improve advertising return, please request our white paper Outlook® Media Planner & Forecasting Tool – Wearout Retrospective and Application

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Effective Ethnic Advertising Results From Understanding the Cultural Impact on Your Brand

With a purchasing power estimated to reach 1.5 trillion this year, the U.S. Hispanic segment has become a key target for many advertisers. With our studies proving that Hispanics tend to be more responsive to advertising than their non-Hispanic counterparts in terms of recall (54% higher Related Recall)…

  …and persuasion (50% more persuasive results)…

  …this creates a very attractive scenario for brands poised to grow.

However, even with an understanding behind the Hispanic diversity, brands find that advertising to the Hispanic population is challenging. Assumptions may be made around the brand’s equity and positioning performing similarly across the different demographic segments.  Avoiding these assumptions becomes a key element for success, particularly if the company plans to adopt a Total Market strategy.

Know Where You – and Your Competitors – Stand in the Category

Advertising tactics should vary depending of the brand’s position in the market; so understanding where your brand preference falls within the category across the different target segments becomes a priority when formulating a brand’s communication plan. The example below, an example using MSW•ARS’ Brand Preference data for the US Toilet Tissue category among Females, illustrates how inclination among the top five brands changes when comparing the Non-acculturated, Semi-acculturated and General Market Female segments. While Charmin is the consistent leader across all three groups, Scotts’ secondary position is eroded among Semi-Acculturated Hispanic Females by Angel Soft.  Similarly, preference for the Quilted North brand falls back among Semi-acculturated Hispanic Females, as this group claims preference of value-based store brands like Costco’s Kirkland, and Walmart’s White Cloud.

Understand What You – and Your Competitors – Stand For in Hispanic’s Minds

Great caution should be exercised in understanding the relative type and strength of equity a brand – or a particular RTB included in the selling proposition – holds in the countries from where Non-acculturated Hispanics originate when developing a communication strategy.  This is due to the fact that Hispanics may lack, or have a different understanding of, what the brand represents based on the communication in their – or their parent’s – country of origin.  Advertising may make assumptions about similar brand equity across the different cultural groups, when education about the brand’s characteristics is needed instead.

For example, there is limited understanding of the damage caused to the hair when coloring using ammonia-based colorants in Mexico.  This results in advertising highlighting a “reduced damage” component tending to be less persuasive among the Non-Acculturated Hispanic Women when compared to other segments, than advertising communicating other functional benefits like tint duration.

Another example that illustrates this dynamic is evidenced by an ad quantitatively tested by MSW•ARS Research using the TouchPoint solution for the Tecate beer brand among the Hispanic market. In the ad, the one man in a bar who remains stoic after several attractive women pass by him is rewarded by a Mexican-type fiesta complete with some stereotypical characters, like a luchador.  While the Hispanic Males who participated in the study found the creative to be funny and engaging, the behavioral, non-cognitive results showed the ad failed to generate any change in brand preference among men towards Tecate.

Revision of cognitive data indicated men focused their attention on the fiesta element, the attractive/sensuous girls, and the “luchador” characters; all of these effectively tying back the ad to a Mexican beer.  As a result, Mexican beers showed the strongest shift in preference (CCPersuasion) when compared to beers from other countries as identified below:

Unfortunately for Tecate, other Mexican brands of beer – such as Corona and Modelo – had stronger brand preference among Hispanic men. Therefore, while linking the advertising to Mexican cultural elements was effective to switch beer purchasers over to “Mexican brands,” it was not effective enough to drive consumers to one particular brand among those imported from Mexico. Mexican beers with the highest preference, such as Corona and Modelo, were the ones that capitalized from the ad, while the advertised brand Tecate saw flat results.

Stronger understanding of the Hispanic male beer consideration set, including brand preference, would have given further insight that advertising for Tecate needed not only to cue the Mexican element, but incorporate strong branding elements to Tecate in order to avoid potential misattribution.

Learn why

Developing effective advertising for Hispanics, or in which Hispanic are included as an important segment, requires expertise and constant monitoring throughout the different stages of the creative process.  Our Brand Building Portfolio offers a consistent analytic philosophy to drive a clear incremental improvement in each step with an end-to-end perspective.

Please contact your MSW●ARS representative to find out how our products and research can help you develop effective advertising for the Hispanic market.

A continuing advertising campaign can bring instant recognition to a brand’s communications.  In an era in which consumers are drowning in commercial messaging and in which a thirty second advertisement is considered long, this could certainly be considered a benefit.  However, we are all familiar with the adage “familiarity breeds contempt”.  Can a continuing campaign wear out its welcome, with consumers quickly dismissing the communication and tuning out the message because they are tired of the messenger?

To investigate the utility of a continuing campaign at brand communication, we turned to the MSW●ARS historical database of television copy-testing results.  All advertisements in this database have been coded for a battery of content elements.  Of these, two clearly reflect elements of a continuing campaign for a brand, one audio and one visual:

Recognized Continuing Music Theme – Is the music clearly identified with the brand or company?

Recognized Continuing Character – Are one or more of the principal or minor characters in the commercial recognized as part of a continuing advertising campaign?  Is the character recognized as associated with the product by virtue of previous appearances in commercials for the product?

A continuing music theme can be a song or jingle, written specifically for the brand (for example, “I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner” or McDonald’s “I’m Lovin It”) or a popular song licensed for use by the brand (such as Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock” for Chevrolet trucks), as long as it becomes quickly associated with the sponsoring brand.

A common technique brands use to incorporate a particular song or jingle into a continuing campaign is to make the song the main focus of initial ads and then cut back on the song’s prominence in subsequent spots.  For example, Mazda initially built this 2000 ad around the zoom-zoom song:

Then later ads featured the song to a lesser degree, as it became associated with the brand:

And the most recent ads have transitioned to using just the zoom-zoom audio cue without the music chords but reinforced with a visual cue:

Similarly, there is diversity in the types of continuing character employed by marketers.  A continuing character can be an actual person (for example, the Apple Mac and PC guys), an animation (such as Tony the Tiger) or even the personification of the product itself (the M&Ms “spokescandies”).  As the campaign becomes entrenched in the minds of consumers, these characters are able to instantly provide branding cues to viewers even before the brand name is explicitly mentioned.

The Geico Gecko first appeared in the firm’s advertising in 1999 and has become synonymous with the brand.  While viewers may enjoy his unusual exploits, you can be sure he will take the opportunity to remind them that they can “save 15 percent or more on car insurance.”

And among younger generations, it is likely that William Shatner is better known for his long running campaign for Priceline than for his iconic Star Trek character.  While clearly not as agile as a youthful Captain Kirk battling the Gorn, he still leverages his considerable charisma in reminding viewers they can get the best travel deals from Priceline.

For each of these two types of executional campaign elements, we delved into the MSW●ARS database for empirical evidence for whether, and to what degree, these recognized brand cues can affect the branded memorability of an advertisement.  It was found that each is associated with higher related recall levels, with a continuing character being particularly effective in this regard, boosting ad recall to 38 percent above norm, on average.

However, while these results show that these branding cues help to capture attention and link the ad to the brand in viewers’ minds, do they also have a tendency to either overpower the substance of the ad or trigger the dismissal of the communication that familiarity may beget?  To shed some light on this question we went a layer deeper in the database analysis, examining the different aspects of recall for the ads containing these two content elements.

As the following chart shows, for a continuing music theme, both references to executional content and sales messages are elevated to a similar degree as overall ad recall.  However for ads with continuing characters, consumer playback of executional content tends to outstrip overall sales message playback – but importantly, sales message recall is still 30 percent above norm, on average.  But the big news is that viewers tend to recall the ad’s key sales message at very strong levels for both types of brand cues.  It is possible that brands that utilize continuing executional elements are more likely to have consistency in their key proposition, hence easing its communication over time.  Or it may be that the instant branding effect of familiar executional elements facilitates communication overall.

Finally, we also took an in-depth look at the highly recognizable and ongoing campaign for a CPG brand for which MSW●ARS has tested the television advertising for many years – both before and throughout the current campaign.   This campaign uses recognizable continuing characters which have become instantly associated with the brand.

In the year before the campaign started, related recall levels for tested ads were roughly at norm.  However, they immediately jumped with the transition to the new campaign.  In fact, in the first three years related recall results averaged 55% higher than the norm level.  What’s more, levels continued to rise over the subsequent two three-year periods of the campaign.

Looking more specifically at what viewers recalled about the ads, we see that growth in playback related to executional elements, surely driven by references to the continuing characters, outstripped growth in overall related recall.  However, average playback of the key sales message, which was extremely high in the first three year period, dropped noticeably in the third three year period albeit to an average level still well above norm.

While there was consistency in the ads executionally over time, the brand at times shifted focus in its key selling message, often related to the sub-brand being promoted.  In the third three-year time period, a relatively large proportion of the ads were focused on two new key sales messages for which communication levels were relatively low.  This suggests that brands should use caution when changing messaging within a continuing executional framework, ensuring that the drama supports the intended communication.  It could be that use of branding cues, especially continuing characters, may need to be reduced in certain situations – still providing continuity and linkage to the brand but allowing space for sufficient communication and/or demonstration of the key selling message.

The bottom line is that use of brand cues such as a continuing music theme or, in particular, continuing characters can be an effective method to boost branding in an advertising campaign, ensuring that viewers link the advertising to the brand.  Indeed, in this context familiarity breeds not contempt, but rather enhanced communication.

Of course as always, results may vary.  But appropriate research can help brands ensure that their advertising campaigns achieve their objectives.  Please contact your MSW●ARS representative to find out how our products and research can help to optimize your brand’s communications.