Today, the Advertising Research Foundation announced that the paper “Effectiveness and Efficiency of TV’s Brand-Building Power: A Historical Review — Why the Persuasion Rating Point (PRP) Is a More Accurate Metric than the GRP” has been voted Best Practitioner Paper 2021 by the JAR Editorial Board.  Along with co-authors Frank Findley of MASB, David Stewart of Loyola Marymount University and Kelly Johnson of Disney, we at MSW Research were very honored to have our work recognized with this prestigious award.

The paper was published in the December 2020 issue of the Journal of Advertising Research.  It addresses the questions of whether television advertising is as effective as in the past and if so, how it compares with other media-platform alternatives.

The major conclusions of the study include the following:

• On a single, quality exposure basis the television ad format is as effective now as it was in the 1980s (based on copy-testing for 30-second television ads collected within the United States for typical categories with brands advertising throughout the years 1980 to 2014 using a consistent methodology, MSW Research’s CCPersuasion^TM measure).

• The rate of delivery of an ad’s selling power per GRP has slowed, requiring approximately 25% more GRPs to deliver the same brand-building power in market as it did in the 1980s.  This implies that television-channel proliferation, time-shifting technology, and simultaneous digital-media consumption (multi-screen behavior) are having an impact on the advertising viewing experience.

 

• This decline is mitigated, however, by a 45 percent increase in the number of households in the United States over the same time period.  Each rating point now represents many more households. So even though fewer households are now effectively reached by a given spending level on a percentage basis, this is not true on an absolute number of households basis.

 

• Despite a potential increase in distracted viewing, television advertising still maintains an effective frequency profile that is comparable to other media channels including digital.  All examined media types – including television – can be effective within the range of average frequencies typically deployed for them.

 

Every media platform has its own strengths and challenges. Although the interruptive nature of television advertising may make it more susceptible to divided attention with other media, it also provides television with one of the most immersive visual and audio experiences.

Television remains an effective media platform, and television advertising should continue to be used to maintain and grow market share. By focusing attention on the development stage, brands can improve advertisement quality to such a degree as to more than compensate for the decline in the rate of ad selling power delivery per gross rating point.

Trafficking gross rating points behind advertisements on the basis of their persuasive strength allows for the diminishing returns dictated by wearout to be managed while maximizing sales power delivered in market.  This means actively managing both quantity and quality of the advertising media plan, which can be achieved through focusing on Persuasion Rating Points (GRPs weighted by a measure of persuasion), rather than GRPs alone.

Contact us for a full reprint of the article.

Last week the Marketing Accountability Standards Board (MASB) announced that TouchPoint®, MSW-ARS’s advertising copy test solution, has completed the Marketing Metric Audit Protocol (MMAP) – MASB’s formal process for validating the relationship between a marketing measurement and financial performance.

TouchPoint uses a behavioral, multi-media experience to collect the criterion CCPersuasion® metric. This unique approach avoids common pitfalls, such as cooperation bias, of more direct approaches and thus allows for a more meaningful measurement of consumer preferences.  In fact, CCPersuasion utilizes the patented CCPreference® system (also successfully audited by MASB) as its foundation.  The TouchPoint system is flexible enough to measure individual ads as well as full multi-execution campaigns across a wide variety of media types, and integrates extensive diagnostic feedback demonstrated in the audit to have a strong track record in helping to improve the effectiveness of tested copy.

In the MMAP audit, the CCPersuasion metric was assessed against the MMAP ten characteristics of an ideal metric, as well as MASB’s guidelines for measures of marketing productivity.

Most vitally, the audit requires metrics to substantiate a specific link to financial performance. Regarding the TouchPoint system, the MMAP audit concluded that the CCPersuasion metric is able to quantify the likelihood and magnitude of an ad’s impact on future sales volume and market share.  This is based on a wealth of information collected over many years proving the predictive validity of the CCPersuasion metric.

Specifically, the audit indicates that the CCPersuasion measure predicts TV advertising’s impact on market results at ~0.90 correlation level when the effect of the ad is isolated from the other elements of the marketing mix. One published study that substantiates this conclusion relates the predicted sales volume impacted by advertising to the actual sales volume impacted from independent Marketing Mix Modeling analysis:

 

What does this mean for advertisers? Well, there are a number of different aspects of the TouchPoint system that have been demonstrated to help improve advertising’s Return on Investment.

On the most basic level, an advertising copy test system is used to qualify specific executions for airing or is applied upstream to determine which initiatives should precede for further development. Since TouchPoint uses a criterion measure strongly related to sales impact, advertisers can have confidence that these decisions will be made on the basis of improving advertising’s return.  TouchPoint takes this a step further by providing the Fair Share® benchmark, a unique modeled norm that is superior to traditional normative approaches.  Fair Share represents an estimate of the sales effectiveness, in terms of CCPersuasion level, for a typical ad for the advertised brand, given the category environment and the brand’s position in that environment.

In addition to giving a meaninfgul go/no-go indication on copy, the magnitude validation of the CCPersuasion metric allows for a forecast of an ad’s expected impact when aired. This is implemented through use of an easy to use elasticity grid which sets expectations based on the CCPersuasion level.

 

 

In addition, MSW-ARS has decades of experience researching and publishing on the topic of advertising wearout. By marrying the findings of validation studies with these wearout learnings, we developed the patented Outlook® media planner.   The Outlook planner, which has been cited in numerous award winning case studies, enables brands to forecast sales impact, plan the number of executions needed to meet business objectives, and allocate media spend among multiple tested executions so as to optimize return on advertising investment.

 

 

The TouchPoint system is also capable of assessing early stage stimuli using the same validated methodology to raise the odds of success before costly development on specific executions has begun. This is demonstrated through a study linking the test results of early stage video value propositions with the CCPersuasion levels of finished executions developed from these propositions.  The results show that ads based on strong value propositions are much more likely to perform above benchmark at the finished execution stage.

 

 

As noted earlier, the TouchPoint system incorporates extensive diagnostics that have been shown to significantly relate to the criterion CCPersuasion measure and which have been shown to provide guidance for improving the effectiveness of tested copy. This diagnostic learning is also key in helping brands understand what is working and how it can best be deployed.  The potential for improvement fueled by validated diagnostic feedback over the course of time is illustrated by a four year case study in which a global MSW-ARS client was able to improve both qualification rate and average CCPersuasion level year-over-year for each year of the study.

 

 

Finally, it should be noted that CCPreference, the foundation of TouchPoint’s CCPersuasion metric, is a common metric running throughout the range of MSW-ARS solutions from early stage creative development through copy testing and creative and brand health tracking. This provides marketers with a unique ability to better connect research from one stage of the advertising process to the next, avoiding potential outages that can occur when attempting to move between different stages in the research process which are assessed using different systems and metrics.

 

 

To learn more about the TouchPoint copy test system, it’s performance on the MMAP audit and how it can help improve your brand’s financial return from advertising, please contact us at aklein@mswarsresearch.com.

 

In previous blogs we have commented on the validity and practicality of applying the MASB Brand Investment and Valuation model.  In those articles we focused on the value the brand derives from cash flows from existing offerings.  But what about potential future cash flows from planned brand extensions not yet launched – both within existing categories and into new categories?  Can the model be successfully applied to those cases?

The answer is a resounding yes!  All that is required is a measurement of brand strength for the extension before it launches.  Traditionally this has been tried by measuring brand recall among a group of consumers exposed to either launch copy (if available) or a video concept and using this and expected media support to project awareness.  While it is possible to accurately project awareness levels in this way, ATU validation studies show this provides only a partial answer as brand awareness explains only about 40% of the variance in trial rates (correlation of 0.65).  In essence, just because a consumer is aware of a brand doesn’t mean she will try it.

However, using the MSW•ARS system it is possible to also gather brand preference before launch.  When awareness is multiplied by brand preference, the relationship improves with approximately 90% of the variance being explained (correlation of 0.94).

Please contact your MSW●ARS representative to learn more about how our brand preference approach has been integrated across our entire suite of solutions.