Data Tracker : Getting creative with advertising

What makes for great advertising? Six seconders or a long film, one liners or lengthy copy, funny or sentimental ads? Should advertising be product-driven or brand-focused? With people splitting their attention between multiple media platforms, many doubt the efficacy of advertising today. But it works and can be accountable to brands according to a report by Nielsen and Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS).
 

• The five key drivers contributing to advertising’s effectiveness are: creative, reach, targeting, recency and context
• The study’s findings show how the relative balance between these drivers has changed over time and how it works across TV and digital
• Creative quality contributes as much to a brand’s in-market success as all other factors combined
• When creative is strong, it’s the overwhelming driver of in-market success: up to 80% for traditional TV and 89% for digital advertising.
• When creative is weak, the sales lift is also weak across TV and digital.
• Creative quality today is being driven by new breakthroughs in data and technology
• New tools and techniques can enhance, extend and better target reach
• New formats and destinations seem to arise every day to help advertisers find their consumers
• These can’t match the power that great creative delivers when it comes to driving truly successful ad campaigns
• Less than half of all campaigns are doing a good job of targeting buyers of the brand or category
• TV ads generally have consistently high-quality creative as opposed to digital ads, whose range is wide, including higher and lower quality brand communication
• But in TV campaigns, the study says, the contribution from creative content is substantially lower (37%) than the contribution from media (50%) to overall creative quality
• In the case of digital campaigns, the gap between really good and really bad ads remains significant
• For large cross-media campaigns, reach still comes primarily from television.
• Very few digital campaigns can match the reach of a TV campaign
• Understanding consumer purchase cycles and timing advertising closer to purchases can boost sales dramatically

Source: Nielsen catalina solutions ; Period: 2016 to Q1 2017
Note: This paper by Nielsen and Nielsen Catalina Solutions (NCS) is based on two new meta studies and more than 10 years of experience linking advertising to sales results