Blind leading the blind

The underpinnings of research out this week from industry group Think Premium Digital on advertising impact comparisons between rival digital media channels is that marketers largely treat all online platforms as equal for advertising impact but do the opposite in other media, from TV shows to AM versus FM radio networks and out-of-home formats and locations.

Critics says it’s a howling blind spot for an industry that doesn’t move without data, measurement and metrics. 

“In digital we often think about context in the most extreme negative way like brand safety, and we accept there’s a negative impact if your online ad is in an unsafe environment,” says former GroupM Chief Digital Officer Venessa Hunt, who now heads the industry group backed by major publishers and broadcasters. 

“But we very rarely take into account the positive halo effect that different content environments have on advertising. We’ve been so fixated in digital with chasing the cheapest CPM, the last click or last touch…we’ve not taken time to do ask what is the impact of where my actual advertising is.”

Funding and findings bias

Hence those publishers and platforms, including Nine, Seven, 10ViacomCBS, News Corp and Foxtel Media, who argue their “premium” content environments online deliver higher advertising impact, have funded a year-long research program with 5,000 respondents run by Media Science’s Dr Duane Varan, attempting to quantify and benchmark leading online channels and their contribution to measures like advertising recall.

Although the optics of funding and findings bias are real in these research projects, the methodology deployed for Think Premium Digital’s Benchmark Series has garnered broad acceptance, at least among top media agency investment and trading directors.

So, who wins for impact and recall in online video advertising between BVOD, YouTube, Facebook and “run-of-internet” websites? Here’s the key findings from a brief which asked how memorable video advertising in premium digital content was compared to other platforms and environments:

• Unprompted recall was 49 per cent higher for BVOD (52 per cent) versus 35 per cent for YouTube short form content (less than nine minutes).
• Unprompted recall for ads in long form content (greater than nine minutes) for BVOD was 11 per cent higher than YouTube (52 per cent versus 47 per cent).
• Differences were negligible between BVOD and YouTube for brand lift (14 per cent versus 13 per cent respectively).
• But BVOD and YouTube trounced Facebook for unprompted recall – BVOD was nearly five times greater than Facebook (52 per cent versus 11 per cent).
• Brand lift scores were 14 per cent and 10 per cent respectively for BVOD versus Facebook video ads.
• YouTube and BVOD also significantly outscored run-of-internet video ads for unprompted recall – BVOD was 136 per cent higher (52 per cent) than general web video (22 per cent). YouTube was at 41 per cent for long and short formats combined.   
• Dr Varan’s argument for why BVOD tops key measurement comparisons against YouTube and Facebook is because “memory builds brands and when people are consuming information and entertainment, memory pathways are more open to brand messages.”

Lower funnel to brand

For Venessa Hunt, the results are important if digital media is to shed its cast as a performance-led channel and broaden to one which can also contribute to brand building programs. 

“If we think about how digital has grown over the years, it used to be where you use lower funnel advertising so effectively,” says Hunt. “You would build your brand in offline areas and then you would come into online and push them further down that funnel to be able to book your test drive or get your credit card application or whatever. It’s obviously moved. Consumers have moved into brand touch points in digital environments and our advertising hasn't kept up with that sophisticated move.

Hunt says most digital activity “a majority of the time” still looks at either performance metrics or media metrics when it comes to digital “rather than looking at the fact that digital can and does build brands. What's more important – and the reason why we did this study – is that this information didn't exist in Australia.”

The methodology and study may be broadly accepted by key advisors and agencies but there’s no guarantee that advertiser money will now start pouring into premium content environments. Market blindness and even resistance to research is common.

Boycotts and blacklists

Duane Varan says there are parallels with the aversion to advertising in news environments. 

This issue blew up last year in the early days of Covid – newsmedia mastheads and broadcasters were pulling record audience numbers online but advertisers essentially boycotted news sites and print editions.

“Brand owners need to have a position as to whether or not their brand wants to be repeatedly present in what is newsworthy and interesting and informative content – but might not be a particular narrative that ultimately they want to be associated with,” Nestle marketing and ecommerce boss and AANA chair Martin Brown told Mi3 in August last year when boycotts were in full swing. “That might be the reason why advertisers are blacklisting certain content and certain narratives, because, honestly, the news cycle can get into such a frenzy that it doesn't become a valuable space for your brand to associate with. 

“Right now, in the midst of the tension that exists across the news cycle at the moment, the strongly held emotions and really quite divergent positions people have got on issues mean that you've got to be super sensitive to this and be aware and make conscious decisions," said Brown. Incoming GroupM CEO, Aimee Buchanan held a similar position as Brown in the same Mi3 podcast.  

Varan says this is a common and seemingly common sense view, but countless research studies say the opposite. 

“There’s a popular assumption in the market that news is a bad environment for ads,” he says. “That's actually a flawed assumption. The assumption is because the content might be negative that an ad being placed in that environment might suffer. But actually, we've done many, many studies where we've consistently demonstrated that ads actually do much better in news," says Varan. 

“The reason is because people go into news very alert, active, lean forward and thinking about the story mode. And we know from other work that we've done, we've consistently seen that that is going to translate into better memory results, which really helps explain that clear superiority we saw across all three stages of memory, not just memory as a generic concept, but across the attention stage, the storage and processing stage, as well as the retrieval stages of memory.”

Varan says “what was amazing” when looking at the Australian data was when the same ads placed in the same news environments and then tested in the US, the effects disappear completely. “There is no premium effect for this content in the US because to an American audience, the Australian content, the Australian publisher, they don't have that relationship. They don't have to trust that credibility. Suddenly, it's no longer premium.”