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Brand-to-Media Engagement Assessments
Optimizing Media Selection:
Guaranteeing Better Consumers Connections & Greater Ad Effectiveness
"I know half my advertising budget is wasted - I just don't know which half!"
John Wanamaker said that nearly a century ago. And what's frightening is that maybe more than half in the 24/7, internet-driven, 21st Century are wasted. But why?
Marketers still buy media based on what an ad agency or gigantic media services company identifies as providing as much reach and frequency as they can afford, in a media vehicle that's ideal for "their" demographic. You pay for it, they run the ad, and that's pretty much it. Given that's the reality, a couple of questions should spring to mind:
- What did you really get? Sure, you get the time or space paid for - which presumably delivered some audience determined by the reach and frequency, but what did you accomplish for your brand.
- Do you have any proof that anyone actually saw or read your message? Do you have any guarantee that readers didn't skip over your ad page? A warranty that the audience that did see it will remember it? Or think well of it?
Current traditional planning provides nothing to let marketers know that they connected with their consumer or that their advertising had any real market effect.
Companies invest countless dollars in developing and supporting their "brands." So wouldn't you feel better about how you were planning your media and spending your money if there were some way to insert your brand's values into the media planning process? To take you beyond standard "reach and frequency" planning?
Q: Why can't the world's leading media planning organizations and advertising agencies achieve maximally effective media plans with their existing tools?
A: Because traditional metrics do not - they cannot - address the very real, critically important issue of the very fact that a brand's appearance in a particular media vehicle either enhances or detracts from a brand's values and, therefore, a brand's level of advertising awareness and imagery.
It's not that the concept of inserting the brand into the media plan hasn't been talked about before. It's been examined on a qualitative basis, but until recently has not been validated on a quantitative, statistically generalizable basis. Media planners haven't had the ability to meaningfully introduce real brand values into the planning process, so they do what they know best. But planning by reach and frequency alone is flawed, because the brand's values and the media vehicle's values may not be consonant - even when the editorial environment and reach and frequency numbers look right.
You'd think that 100 years after Wanamaker's lament there must be more to it. . . some way to assure marketers that they aren't wasting their money. Well, now there is.
Brand Keys has developed Brand-to-Media Engagement (B2ME) assessments that actually measure the degree to which your media plan aligns the values of the individual media vehicle on which you plan to advertise with your brand's values.
It lets planners predict increased levels of brand awareness and positive brand imagery, before your spend your money. Thus, you connect better with your target audience and maximize your brand's ad effectiveness. You get more cost-effective media planning. Before you spend your money!
The Theoretical Framework
At the 7th Annual ARF Copy Research Workshop in 1990, The Advertising Research Foundation published the results of their seminal Copy Validity Project. This research indicated that the methodological framework of "brand liking" or "brand bonding" was the metric most-highly correlated to sales. This is the same framework used by Brand Keys to determine brand-to-media consonance.
It is a quantitatively rigorous empirical system that charts the precise effects upon the levels of advertising awareness and a brand's image due to a brand's prospective appearance within a particular media vehicle. This is true no matter how seemingly appropriate the "editorial environment" or the reported demographics. In the real world, certain media properties can actually reduce attention levels, and damage the reputation or of a brand no matter how many "eyeballs" your agency has promised.
We've conducted validity studies for print, TV, and cable plans, and it works every time! The validity studies demonstrate conclusively that the effect of a particular media option on a brand extends to the level of the commercials' effectiveness and its ability to connect with the chosen target audience.
The foundation of the Brand Keys system is a combination of indirect psychological inquiry blended with factor, regression and causal path analyses. The psychological assessment questionnaire has a test-retest reliability coefficient of .93, according to independent consumer research done in the U.S. and in the UK. This approach has been used effectively for 20 years in many consumer and B2B product and service categories, in 26 countries worldwide.
It is axiomatic that by selecting media where consumers pay more attention to your advertising, you connect better with them. And nobody can deny that selecting media so that your target audience thinks better of your brand, is, at the very least, related to increased advertising effectiveness. These are inarguably the factors that are the very raison d'être for the advertising exercise: increase the likelihood a consumer will be aware of a brand, will actually pay attention to the advertising for that brand, and will come away with a markedly favorable impression of the brand being advertised.
Current research reveals that Brand-to-Media Engagement metrics can be an innovative, valuable complement to the more traditional media planning tools. Optimized results can be accomplished without sacrificing traditional skill-sets that leverage reach & frequency, or demographic & lifestyle audience characteristics.
There are strategic applications too. The output identifies which of the top four drivers of brand loyalty are being the most-highly influenced by the media option. With this information for each of the media alternatives being considered - be it print or Internet, network TV or cable - it is actually possible to select media for an ad campaign on the basis of which option better reinforces the brand's strategic copy objective(s).
Whatever the media, the Brand-to-Media Engagement Model proves that media planners can now be armed with a new, highly effective metric that can result in superior media plans for their brands, and attendant increased levels of connectivity and effectiveness for their clients.
Planners can now guarantee that the plans are about generating business results, and they can now do it before they spend their clients' money!
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