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.

In our previous posting on “How to Turn the Cord Cutting Trend into an Advantage”, we outlined how substantial video viewing time has migrated to internet-based platforms.  This growth of online video has created new levels of complexity and uncertainty in the media buying and placement world, but also has brought new opportunity to those brands that have endeavored to leverage new media in their marketing plans.

While both online video viewership and digital video ad spend have seen dramatic increases in recent years, both are still relatively small in relationship to television.  Projections from eMarketer for 2014 estimated total US TV ad spend at $68.54 billion while the comparable figure for online video was $5.96 billion.  And in terms of viewing, comScore has reported that total online video viewing hours in the US (excluding Netflix and adult video) amounted to only about 4 percent of total TV viewing hours for the first quarter of 2014.  So, in terms of efficiently achieving reach and frequency targets, online video is not ready to supplant television.  However, used wisely, online video advertising has an important role to play.

The cord cutting post also showed that an ad that is effective when viewed on television is also highly likely to work well in an online video format and that video advertising on digital platforms can be as effective as advertising on television.  In addition, when deployed in some of the following ways, online video advertising can bring benefits beyond what would be realized from television alone.

Improving Reach:  While TV will efficiently deliver strong reach numbers, there are some segments of the population – particularly the younger demographic – that television is less successful at finding.  A comScore study of ten cross-platform ad campaigns found that about one-eighth of reach, on average, came exclusively from digital platforms.  The following example from a frozen-vegetable brand campaign shows that not only did digital sources, including online video, contribute meaningful incremental reach beyond TV alone, but they also helped achieve some degree of increase in reach in the later weeks of the campaign when reach from TV had plateaued (despite continued spending):

Targeting:  As marketers sharpen their consumer targets, they need their media to deliver the message to those consumers.  Digital media is highly effective at reaching specific media targets.  While digital is readily thought of as effective at targeting Millennials, who often spend more time with digital than traditional media, the same comScore study also illustrates how digital can be used to effectively target other segments.  The following graphic contrasts the digital only reach of two different campaigns.  A cereal campaign strongly over-indexed among the under-18 segment, while a frozen vegetable campaign over-indexed among middle-aged viewers, especially women.

Engagement:  Bruce Springsteen once wrote about “57 Channels and Nothin’ On”.  Of course now there are far more channels and yet we have all had the familiar experience of flipping endlessly through channels in search of something remotely interesting.  The interactive and searchable nature of digital media, however, enables self-selection which can enhance the level of engagement with the content.  In fact, in an IAB sponsored study, “74 percent of participants described the experience of watching an original digital video they liked as equal to or better than that of watching something they liked on TV.”

And an engaged viewer is a receptive viewer.  Studies by MSW●ARS have found that the effectiveness of advertising, in terms of its ability to persuade, is substantially enhanced when the media in which it is embedded is engaging to viewers.  In fact, these studies have found advertisements to be 35 percent more effective among viewers who found the media content to be engaging versus those who did not.

Earned Media:  It is hard to beat the media cost – and ROI – for an ad that goes viral on YouTube.  Getting consumers to actually seek out and share your advertising is something that is only possible through online video.  Old Spice is one brand that has done this with outstanding success, as evidenced by the more than 50 million views of the “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” video, among many others:

 

Of course, simply putting your ad on YouTube is far from a guarantee of going viral.  However, MSW●ARS has developed a battery of questions based on Flow Theory which measure the engagement of viewers with a video based on five dimensions: focus & attention, loss of self-consciousness, altered sense of time, intrinsic rewards and immersion.  The Engagement metric derived from this battery has been shown to be predictive of the propensity of a video to go viral.  Specifically, in a study of short-form videos available on YouTube, the most engaging videos in the MSW●ARS database had nearly 20 times as many views, on average, as the least engaging videos:

Long-Form Video:  Many of the most popular (and shared) viral advertisements are classified as long-form video.  These short films – often from 2 to 5 minutes in length – not intended for on-air broadcast have become staples on year-end “Best Ad” lists because they do something that has become difficult to do with the 15 and 30 second ad formats typical of on-air media – build an emotional connection through effective story-telling.

As viral videos, long-form ads must be able to not only keep viewers attention but also convince viewers to share the video with others – no easy feat.  But when effectively done, such a video can play an important role in establishing a brand’s identity in the minds of consumers and generating positive equity for the brand.  An excellent example is the Scarecrow video from Chipotle.  Released in September of 2013, it now has about 14 million views on YouTube.  This striking video has created tremendous buzz for Chipotle, while also portraying the brand’s values in a way that effectively differentiated the chain from its competition.  Chipotle recently reported year over year earnings growth of 27.8%.

Enhancing E-commerce:  A unique form of online video is the User Generated Product Review Video (UGPRV).  These are reviews created by product users with their webcam or smartphone.  The EXPO social media website curates these videos to allow marketers to easily distribute them onto e-commerce, owned, and earned media channels.  Studies conducted by MSW●ARS have shown that UGPRV’s complement professionally produced advertisements since they provide enhanced product focus.  Specifically, they are more apt to discuss a product’s convenience, quality and performance relative to competitive products.  Copy testing of both a professionally produced and a user generated video (individually and in combination) for a particular brand demonstrates that this synergy is very real.

And there is further evidence that these testimonies are compelling to viewers who encounter them on e-commerce sites such as amazon.  According to an MSW●ARS study conducted in conjunction with EXPO, visitors who viewed a UGPRV on an e-commerce site showed increases in both positive attitudes towards the product and purchase intent versus those who did not view the UGPV.  This was particularly true among younger consumers.

Length Considerations for Pre-Roll

An IAB study came to the conclusion that for pre-roll ads, a 15-second length was superior to 30-seconds in terms of persuading consumers to take action or change brand perception.  30-second spots worked better in user-initiated placements for which viewers would have more patience.  To provide guidance for those advertisers for whom pre-rolls are a staple, MSW●ARS has formulated guidelines for effective 15-second spots based on extensive studies of ads of different lengths:

• If possible, create original 15-second ads rather than cutting down longer existing ads.  Not only is it a creative challenge to decide what to leave in and what to cut, but original 15’s have been seen to be more effective in studies of copy-testing results.
• Communication should be reduced to a single idea.  There is insufficient time to effectively substantiate multiple key ideas.
• Use images and pictures instead of words.  The time for words is limited, so strive for images that speak volumes.
• At least 3 to 5 seconds of product shots should be included.  It is important to get to the point quickly and make sure the product comes through as the hero of the ad.
• “Storyline” formats should be avoided.  These are very difficult to do well in less than 60 seconds, much less 15.
• When editing down longer ads, cut the correct content.  Aim to cut scenes with little branding content, superfluous messaging or low interest.

Online video is playing a growing role in advertisers’ total media mix.  But as with any other advertising, the strength of the creative is key in ensuring the media spend is optimized. MSW●ARS has the tools to help advertisers ensure sales-effective creative regardless of media platform.  Please contact your MSW●ARS representative to find out more.