Quantifying the connection: premium video & brand building

This week’s egtabite brings your attention to a study conducted by NBCUniversal in a partnership with Accenture: “Quantifying the connection: premium video & brand building”. The objective of this joint study was to quantify advertising's ROI in premium video, social media and short-form video, thus answering the question marketers regularly ask: “Is premium content worth the cost?”

Background

The incentive for this study derived from the fact that in recent years, with the advent of social networks and short-form video platforms, some clients have been lured away from the essentials of what really works in advertising by the promise of something new. Companies that were once eager to shift to new platforms are now rethinking their "shiny first" strategies.

In 2016, ABC and Accenture released a study that found multiplatform TV has a large halo effect on digital advertising—and that a significant portion of digital’s claimed-ROI can and should be credited to television (full study available here). NBCUniversal wanted to develop that argument further and dig deeper into the matter and therefore partnered with Accenture to take the study a few steps further.

Scope and outcomes

The scope of the study is spread across multiple media channels, the performance of which is measured on the basis of the consumer’s purchase journey key metrics. Thirty brands were also analysed in this study. 

Accenture found that more than one-quarter of paid search advertising’s brand impact – specifically, ad awareness and purchase intent – can be attributed directly to linear TV. Reducing TV investment would therefore result in a -27% loss in search ROI or a -22% loss in social ROI.

When it comes to building brands, Accenture’s research shows that premium video clearly has the edge. The study found that, at the top of the purchase funnel, premium content delivers four times as much brand awareness for every dollar spent as paid social media, and more than eleven times as much as short-form digital video.

And at the bottom of the funnel—purchase intent—premium video wins out again, delivering two times more purchase intent than paid social media, and two-and-a-half times more than short-form digital video. The research also showed that investing across platforms (TV, long-form and short-form digital video, social) with a single premium publisher improves advertising effectiveness.

Preparing for the Upfronts, Linda Yaccarino, chairman of advertising sales and client partnerships at NBCUniversal said: “Effective marketing strategies are built on smart media mixes, as well as an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium.”

Why this matters for egta members?

Social platforms still claim they have more advanced data and optimisation capabilities than TV. That may have been the case years ago, but not anymore – television has caught up with digital and is offering marketers the data solutions they crave for. The fact is, when it comes to targeting at scale, TV is the new digital.

The study proves that effective marketing strategies are built on smart media mixes, as well as on a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each medium.