Ad Impact Booster: mastering creativity and media planning

MEDIALAAN, one of Belgium’s leading television, radio and multimedia sales houses, has launched a new service in the form of an interactive online page designed to help brands extract maximum value from their TV advertising. The Ad Impact Booster, which draws on insights from over 20 years of TV impact research, is a practical guide to turn marketers into true campaign impact experts. This initiative will also be presented at egta’s Market Intelligence Meeting in Rome.

A guide to achieving higher impact from TV advertising

MEDIALAAN’s model explains what makes a campaign successful, and indeed what creative pitfalls to avoid. It looks at why viewers recognise some campaigns better than others and why viewers may mistake a campaign for that of a competitor brand. It also quantifies and predicts the impact of getting different creative elements of a campaign right, helping marketers to ensure viewers correctly attribute their campaigns to their brands.

The TV advertising creative and media planning are, together, the two most influential elements in determining the impact a campaign will have. MEDIALAAN’s model analyses the relative importance of the different factors in each, attributing values to Identification, Distinction and Emotion (creative factors) and Visibility (media plan factor), as well as the potential increase in impact of each.

Four steps for brands to boost ad impact

1. Focus on the creative elements of the ad: a combination of what’s familiar and what’s different
The combination of identification and distinction assures that the campaign puts the brand to the forefront (and not, for instance, the category or the competitor’s assets).

2. Balance identification and distinction according to existing brand awareness and sector
In sectors with large numbers of competitors, brands need to place greater focus on making their advertising distinctive, while brands that have low brand awareness should place more focus on identification.

3. Aim for media reach and generate visibility
Reach is the fundamental layer of the media plan and is critical for awareness and impact.

4. Adjust your spot length, opportunity-to-see (OTS) and share-of-voice (SOV) according to the identification-distinction ratio indicated above.
For new brands and campaigns, it proves advantageous to invest in OTS and provide sufficient ad length. Brands in highly competitive sectors should push for the highest SOV.

Predicting and quantifying ad impact boost

The model also predicts how much each different element within Identification, Distinction, Emotion and Visibility is likely to increase the impact of an ad. For example, ensuring a spot is properly identifiable to the brand in question through the right use of voice, music, characters within the spot, and perhaps the use of a celebrity, can increase a campaign’s impact score by 8%. Extending the spot length by ten seconds can increase identification by 7%.

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Why this matters for egta members

Today’s most successful media sales houses are establishing themselves as real partners for marketers, moving beyond simply selling spots to offering consultative services to help their clients achieve better advertising outcomes. In this way, they provide much-needed support for people working for advertisers and agencies faced with a rapidly changing digital ecosystem. In MEDIALAAN’s case, this extends to offering workshops for those that require further guidance.

Sofie Rutgeerts from MEDIALAAN commented: “The beauty of this model is both the integration of all relevant elements as well as the identification of the interplay between these different elements. In the workshops with advertisers, the model facilitates the discussion of the complex dynamic of impact.”

MEDIALAAN’s Ad Impact Booster is a great example of an initiative that takes insights based on a long-running and robust research methodology and turns them into practical advice that can be followed to increase advertising impact. If you’d like to have more information about this initiative, please contact MEDIALAAN.