Universal McCann: Yes, You Can Plan for Word-of-Mouth - Graeme Hutton - MediaBizBloggers

Like it or not just because a brand has great wordofmouth doesn39t mean it39s safe to spend less on advertising The evidence we have gathered at UM implies that far from being dissonant sources of consumer awareness and information advertising and wordofmouth can be shown to have a powerful symbiotic relationshipTo assess the relationship between advertising and wordofmouth we constructed a regression model built specifically for the purpose The model tapped two syndicated data sources Keller Fay39s Talk Track for wordofmouth and Kantar39s Media Intelligence for media spend We looked at two different advertisers both of whom are UM clients Let39s call them Advertiser A and BBoth Advertiser A and B are large brands who are household names Advertiser A has a distinct yet broad female bias while Advertiser B has a somewhat upscale and stylish appeal The two advertisers operate in different market categories and draw on advertising39s ability to help spur their business in markedly dissimilar ways Consequently as we might expect advertising39s potential impact on their wordofmouth WOM was also distinctly different for each marketerExtensive data interrogation revealed the most pragmatic way of correlating the two data sources was to create rolling three month averages for each data set refined by some minor tweaks by channelFor each marketer we were able to determine a clear correlation between advertising weight and wordofmouth For Advertiser A it was 94 and for Advertiser B 89Since the model included media spend we could also establish advertising39s return on investment in building WOM Importantly the model39s spend inputs were not based on total media spend but on Kantar39s reported investment in each media channel In other words not only could we see advertising39s overall effect in helping build WOM but the model would also tell us which media were more effectiveAdvertiser A39s unexpected result dollar for dollar women39s magazines out performed television by a factor x25 Yes for every 1 spent on women39s magazines we would have had to have spent 25 to build the same WOM effect on TV This compelling finding triggered our curiosity to quiz this further amp8211 why were magazines so powerful for this advertiserKeller Fay39s Talk Track can trace specific WOM brand mentions down to an individual magazine We sought empirical evidence of brand mentions for Advertiser A at the individual title level that might corroborate the model39s findings Since the regression analysis was based on rolling three months data we wouldn39t expect to see an exact match to the advertiser39s magazine schedule But by comparing Advertiser A39s brand mentions in over 30 magazines to each magazine39s individual reach of Advertiser A39s regular users we saw a heartening correlation between the two of 78 Not quite proof positive but good circumstantial evidence nonethelessAdvertising clearly appeared to help Advertiser A build their WOM and our model indicated that advertising helped generate up to 70 of the total WOM for that marketerAlthough we investigated many alternatives we found the same approach also worked best in building a regression model for Advertiser B In summary we were able to see a clear return on investment that differed distinctly by channel and reflected this particular advertiser39s broader based media strategy Since this advertiser is the market leader in a high interest category and whose quality products command a price premium Advertiser B is explicitly less reliant on advertising Consequently in this instance we saw that advertising generated 23 of the brand39s wordofmouth but this was wholly consistent with the role of advertising for this marketerAs the media world has become more complex consumer wordofmouth has grown in importance Arguably a key factor in this phenomenon is that each consumer has become their own integrator their own proactive aggregator of what they see hear and interact with Wordofmouth is the consumer39s own output and interpretations of their aggregationsYet most wordofmouth research studies with the exception of Keller Fay have a purely online perspective and focus on online conversations postings and areas such as consumer video sharingWhile online conversation and social media monitors are invaluable in discerning consumer trends none of them directly demonstrate the value of other media We need to continue to develop wordofmouth tools which appraise not just digital media but the complete media communications spectrum As Lord Kelvin the great pioneering 19th century scientist succinctly put it If you cannot measure it you cannot improve itGraeme is SVP Director of Consumer Insights ampamp Research Graeme is responsible for ensuring that all appropriate proprietary and syndicated research tools and resources are applied in the development of consumer insight strategies for a total communications research platformfrom TV to chat roomswhich informs the efforts of Universal McCann and its agency partners Graeme can be reached at GraemehuttonumwwcomRead all Graeme39s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Curious Thoughts from Curious Minds MediaBizBloggersCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates MediaBizBlogger

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Universal McCann: Yes, You Can Plan for Word-of-Mouth - Graeme Hutton - MediaBizBloggers

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