Improving Brand Linkage and Advertising ROI Through Better Campaign Planning

While Communicus has been quantifying the waste caused by brand linkage problems for decades, other researchers are now also using measurement systems that estimate the extent of the problem. As a result, just about everyone who’s in the advertising research business has some advice on how to create commercials and ads that have strong brand linkage. However, an often overlooked way to improve the brand identification of your advertising involves the structure of your multimedia campaign. Based on decades of campaign measurement, Communicus has some advice on how to build a campaign that consumers will know is yours.

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TV Advertising in the Age of Time Shifting

Television as an advertising medium is and has been the foundation upon which most advertising campaigns are built. But many experts claim that time-shifting represents the end of traditional TV advertising. So what has really happened to television commercial awareness since time-shifting became possible? Can a traditional media plan still be effective? Are new media tools the answer to building back what has been lost?

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Quantifying Advertising Impact with the Longitudinal Research Design

While it seems like a relatively straightforward question, ‘What are we getting for those millions of dollars of advertising spending?’, advertising researchers continue to struggle with how to actually quantify the impact of advertising. Both traditional and continuous tracking studies have proven to be relatively insensitive tools; despite the best efforts of the statisticians, the econometric modeling that accompanies these approaches is rarely able to find significant links between advertising and any brand metrics beyond awareness. The longitudinal design, as pioneered by Communicus, provides accurate measures of the impact of advertising in-market, and answers the related question, ‘What would happen if we didn’t advertise?’

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A Closer Look at the Promise and the Reality of Continuous Tracking for Advertising Evaluation

When continuous tracking was first conceived, the idea was that by collecting weekly consumer data and overlaying TV spending data, the statisticians would be able to tell us what the TV campaign was doing for the brand. The concept was sound, but based on the inconvenient presence of so many other variables, the statistical models were generally – at best – only able to correlate TV pressure with brand awareness, not with brand favorability, purchasing, purchase intentions or perceptions. The challenges became even greater when advertisers wanted the continuous tracking companies to also tell them how their other media – some of which do not have time-specific exposures – were performing. Have the continuous tracking companies succeeded because they have fulfilled client expectations, or because advertisers have implicitly agreed to lower their expectations to fit the level of insights that they gain from these studies?

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Accumulated Wisdom With Regards to Media Mix Issues

We've measured over $30 billion worth of multimedia campaigns in the past twenty-five years. An examination of our historical database uncovers some surprising findings, and provides quantitative support for a number of unconventional media mix and allocation strategies.

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Advertising Wearout: Is it Time for a New Commercial? A New Campaign?

Has your commercial plateaued in awareness? Has it outlived its one-time persuasive power? What about your campaign – is it worn out? Plateauing and wearout are often confused, as are the concepts of executional wearout versus campaign wearout. In this paper, we sort it all out, and provide a framework for determining when it’s time for a new commercial, or a new campaign.

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Brands, Sub-brands, and Line Extensions... oh, What a Tangled Web We Weave!

With the cost of new product development high and the success rate low, marketers often look to line extensions as a less expensive means of increasing overall sales. Notwithstanding the raging debate about whether this is good or bad for the base brand, there is little question that one result of all this line extending has been consumer confusion. For a number of CPG advertisers, Communicus has developed methods for isolating the impact of line extension advertising on both the line extension and the base brand. An examination of this body of research identifies the advertising strategies that are most likely to succeed and those that are fraught with risk.

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The Roles of Traditional Advertising and Branded Social Media in a Successful Marketing Communications Campaign

To take full advantage of the new branded social media vehicles, advertisers must develop a better understanding of how these media work in relation to the 'old' traditional media. Communicus research has identified key differences in the brand-building roles played by traditional offline media (TV and print), the more 'traditional' online media (banner ads and online commercials), and the new social media (Facebook and Twitter). Given these differences, a well-integrated and well-executed advertising campaign can harness the strengths of all vehicles to magnify the effectiveness of the entire program.

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