TV As Effective As Ever

Feb 24, 2009 by Mark Maier

Advertising Age has been filled recently with some top notch research like the answer to the question "Guess Which Medium Is As Effective As Ever: TV"....

"A seven-figure ethnographic study due to be released next month by the Nielsen Co.-funded Council for Research Excellence from research firm Sequent and the Center for Media Design at Ball State University appears set to punctuate that point, finding that TV remains the dominant medium even for reaching youth, despite the inroads of digital and social media, according to a person familiar with the research.

If time shifting, ad skipping or clutter really were rendering TV less effective, then it should show up in marketing-mix analyses that have been done since the early 1990s as a lower average sales lift per gross rating point over time.

It doesn't, according to Marketing Management Analytics (MMA),* a unit of Aegis Group's Synovate. "We haven't seen a significant trend in the erosion of effectiveness of TV," said Douglas Brooks, senior VP of MMA. In fact, MMA, which reports to clients each year on its findings regarding aggregate TV effectiveness, has seen a slight uptick in effectiveness in recent years."

TV is also showing offline effectiveness in branding....

"MMA also has found a surprising spillover effect for TV in digital media: About a third of search queries for brands studied are driven by offline advertising, particularly TV -- a higher proportion than that driven by online-display advertising, Mr. Brooks said.

Leonard Lodish, a marketing professor at Wharton and one of the authors of the 1995 "Why Advertising Works" study, has discovered equally surprising results. He's found that TV advertising actually became more effective, not less, after 1995, in a paper published in 2007 by the Journal of Advertising Research, soon to be updated in a new study now awaiting publication by the same journal.

He got at the findings differently than MMA, and with less statistical modeling required, by using data from Information Resources Inc.'s BehaviorScan markets and other matched-market tests that compared different levels of spending in different test markets. Specifically, the average volume lift from incremental TV spending has increased since 1995, according to the study by Mr. Lodish, Wharton colleague Abba Krieger and University of Houston marketing professor Ye Hu.

One reason could be that commercial avoidance, fragmentation and clutter actually increased the reward from spending more. But the study also found a similar, if smaller, improvement since 1995 in volume lift for brands when they had any amount of TV vs. having none at all."

Congratulations to the TV industry, I will be interested to see if this study also shows the effectiveness of Radio and Interactive on branding as well.

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