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
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

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