The present era of uncertainty enforces prudent marketing, not too much, not too little, and more than ever, only of the very best kinds, doing nothing based on street wisdom, herd mentality, “what we always have done”, or weak data.
Objectives and optimizers, team training and financial incentives should be set to achieve the following collection of brand growth metrics:
- Brand growth in inflation-corrected dollars
- Market share growth
- Increase in user base (penetration)
- Increase in composite Consumer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Increase in brand love
- Increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Short-term ROAS (for its effect on executive compensation and stock value)
An optimizer could weight these together with a default at equal weighting, and the brand decider able to change that weighting on the dashboard.
Statistical analysis over time will determine the intercorrelations within this 7-dimensional matrix. This might determine that, for example, one variable (let’s say brand love) drives all the others. This might change the default weighting to upweight the apparent causal driver(s).
Messaging
Advertising works by making the brand more attractive to the prospect/customer, not necessarily at the conscious level. This attraction is achieved by making the brand perception messaging resonate with the person’s deepest motivational drivers, which includes their subconscious aspirational self. This aspirational self is not something the average human being is aware of consciously. Questionnaires do not capture this information. RMT passively collected privacy-protected content consumption analysis reveals this information.
One of the weakest links in advertising has always been the way brand users are portrayed in advertising. Of course, the users are shown to be happy and satisfied with the brand, and they are shown living a fairly good life in a nice home, all of that is good and somewhat obvious. But in order to include a touch of humor, users are often shown to be a bit silly, and in order that the average person can identify with the user in the ad, today’s ads have learned to make the people in the ad seem like normal everyday people.
However, this is a very bland reducer to the mean, when each person subconsciously aspires to be special. An ad can gain power to achieve the seven objectives by a moment in which the user in the ad shows a flash of something outstanding. Perhaps being cool and blasé. Perhaps being sparkling. And so on. These “aspirational self” clues about the category users can be detected by the RMT method.
The new ad should not only contain guidance from all of the usual topnotch questionnaire-based data, but also from behavioral data analyzed through psychographic filters and validated against the seven objective functions.
Attention per se is not necessarily an indicator of attraction. When we say attention, we are referring to the most used measures of attention today, which are gaze at screen, and eye fixations on the ad itself. Latest data from the Wharton Neuroscience RMT partnership sponsored by FOX reveals that in the case of YouTube, for example, only a fifth of the time that the gaze is on the screen during an ad play is the eye fixated on the ad itself. EEG synchrony, which is the best predictor of sales lift (short-term ROAS), is itself best predicted by RMT resonance, which is 6.4 times more sales predictive than eye fixation, and 32 times more sales predictive than gaze duration.
Attention in terms of eye fixation (or even better, EEG attention) can mean interest in the essential brand messaging in the ad, interest in a peripheral aspect of the ad, confusion/cognitive dissonance, morbid curiosity, or skepticism. Only interest in the essential brand messaging is valuable to the advertiser.
Create the messaging platform, creative brief, and creative executions based on the most sophisticated means possible. Detect early inflight whether to keep running the ad as is or not. Mars and TRA showed, at the ARF annual conference in 2012, evidence that short-term ROAS can be increased +52% by early weeding of ads not producing.
Media
The greatest inefficiencies which exist today in media usage by global advertisers are in two areas:
- Context Effects: Advertisers and their media agencies in general, act as if all impressions are of equal value, when in reality, the value of most digital impressions is a small fraction of the value of impressions in television-level streaming and traditional media. Influencers and podcasts are the two great exceptions to this rule.
- Frequency is excessive for a large chunk of the media budget and is insufficient for another large chunk of the media budget. Improving audience measurement across media types in itself has no power to change this. The only way to change this is to make far more sophisticated use of addressable media. Frequency Capping, introduced by my 1990s company Next Century Media, is only effective if it can be applied at the campaign level. Controlling frequency within one media platform at a time has only a slight effect on the overall problem.
Let’s dive a little deeper into each of these two challenges.
Context Effect
There are two levels at which the context predestines the outcomes:
- The media type constrains the range of success available. For example, in digital (other than television level streaming, influencers, and podcasts), the user is actively avoiding advertising to a far greater extent than in traditional media. The attention companies led by Amplified Intelligence have been driving home this point for the better part of a decade, but it has failed to slow the shift of 80% of ad dollars to digital.
- The programming content preceding the ad has an enormous effect on how well the ad performs. The resonance between the content and the ad, as measured by RMT, accounts for differences in short-term sales lift from -50% to +100%. The same wide range of context content effect is shown by the latest Wharton Neuroscience RMT work sponsored by FOX, as shown in these graphs:
By using the RMT method in media selection, the brand places ads only in content which primes the viewer to remain immersed in the same mood when the ad comes on. This greatly reduces the need for frequency, as shown by this study for one of the world’s largest advertisers.
Frequency
The concept of frequency arose a long time ago in advertising, long before the availability of big data. A brand didn’t know when a prospect would be in the market for her or his product, and so advertising needed to be continuously reaching people. Besides, the theory went that the more times you saw an ad, the more likely it could persuade you.
Today, with the proper use of big data, it is possible to make better estimates of when the timing is right to reach a specific person with an ad for your product. In a Leslie Wood analysis of ScanAmerica data, she found that two exposures in the 48 hours before a shopping trip had the most short-term sales lift for CPG products. Joel Rubinson more recently proved that frequent shopper card data can be used to predict when a household is going to be in the supermarket next. With addressable media used in the most sophisticated manner, much less frequency properly placed can cause an increase in recency and therefore sales lift success.
It is best to use all media types, and each type has its own saturation level at which the diminishing returns curve sets in, and it’s time to stop spending more in that media type. Today, most media types hit their saturation point by the time that type achieves a reach of 10-30% of targets. The exception is linear TV where the saturation point is 60% reach (Nielsen). Janus and Sequent in a CIMM analysis report that allocating enough budget to achieve 40% reach of the target in linear followed by allocating enough budget to achieve another 20-40 reach points with MVPD addressable TV minimizes cost and excess frequency.
In this short article, I hope that we have covered enough aspects of how to achieve brand growth without overspending in order to change the way you do marketing. Good hunting!
Posted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership self-publishing platform.
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