To drive growth, we must strengthen the brand, says Peter Field.

For almost the last twenty years, the performance marketing world has been arguing that brand-building advertising is wasteful and unnecessary; that all a business needs to do is to spend their advertising money at the bottom of the sales funnel. This means using targeted performance media to try to convince the small percentage of people who are about to buy, that their brand is the one to choose. It sounds reasonable, but unfortunately it is wrong.

It turns out that it is very difficult and costly to nudge bottom-of-funnel sales for brands that are not valued by target consumers. The UK Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) data show that campaigns that focussed on bottom-of-funnel and did little to strengthen the brand’s mental availability (how readily the brand comes to mind in purchase situations) were about a third as effective as ones that took a more balanced approach, powerfully building mental availability as well.

1: Mental availability drives business success

Here we measure mental availability (MA) through shifts in a basket of brand metrics and we measure business success through shifts in a basket of business metrics such as profit or pricing power growth. And if you look at just the profit impact of bottom-of-funnel campaigns, it was even weaker than this overall business impact. So it is not good enough to live only in the world of bottom-of-funnel performance marketing. This situation is not changing over time as some have argued: if there is any movement in the data over the last twenty years, it is to strengthen the penalty of going down the performance-only route.

So, when Les Binet and I wrote ‘The Long and the Short of It’ we showed that brands need to use both top and bottom-of-funnel advertising. Building long-term demand for the brand amongst all potential buyers whether or not they are buying now and so ensuring that the brand is on their radar when they next buy. As well as harvesting that growing demand in immediate sales amongst those few in the market now. Top-of-funnel advertising turbocharges performance marketing. We argued that on average a 60:40 budget ratio of brand to performance worked best, though this varies moderately by context. Because these are very different tasks, they argue for very different media (as well as very different ads) and for reasons I will come to, TV is the best all-round medium for brand building. With modern connected TV technology, it can also be a very effective performance marketing tool, but that is a less unique strength. 

The importance of brand building is often questioned by start-ups that initially prosper using performance marketing alone. When a product is new and perhaps newsworthy, it can grow virally using bottom-of-funnel advertising, but after usually around two years, that growth starts to falter and becomes more and more expensive to drive using performance marketing alone. This is the growth inflection point, widely missed by start-ups: if they haven’t started to build their brand using top-of-funnel advertising then they have no defence against subsequent start-up competition. And they will usually fail. Happily, there is a growing body of case study evidence of start-ups that pivoted to brand building in time – especially using TV – and continued to prosper.

So, the case for TV advertising has its roots in the fundamental law of growth in marketing, that we have to strengthen our brand in the minds of consumers.

‍2: To build a brand we need consumers to pay attention to our advertising

This sounds obvious and indeed it is, but some argue that advertising need only serve a fleeting reminder of the presence of the brand. It turns out that this is a very inefficient way to use advertising. Building a brand is best accomplished by engaging the consumer’s attention in an audio-visual ad for long enough to create strong and enduring memories and associations for the brand. The work of Dr Karen Nelson-Field, using a huge database of eye-tracking based attention data, has shown that the duration of brand memories increases exponentially as ads are watched for longer.

Amplified Intelligence data shows that the value of an ad that is viewed for 10 seconds is around eight times greater than one viewed for just 5 seconds, in terms of how long consumers are likely to remember the brand associations it created.

Another key finding shown in this chart is that we need at least 2.5 seconds of attention before any memories are reliably created. Less attention than this and memory impacts can actually be negative for secondary brands whose ads are often misattributed to the brand leader: probably worse than not advertising at all! 2.5 seconds of attention may not sound like a big ask, but as we will see, it turns out to be unachievable for many online video platforms and readily achievable for all TV formats.

3: Many Digital Video Platforms struggle to achieve effective attention for brand building

Returning to the research of Dr Karen Nelson-Field, the scale of the challenge faced trying to build brands on digital video platforms becomes alarmingly clear. Nelson-Field measured the active attention durations of 130,000 views of digital video ads (social and non-social) for 1150 brands: a mere 15% of these achieved the 2.5 second brand-building threshold and only a tiny proportion (less than 0.5%) of these met the more valuable level of 10 seconds. Yet all of these ad impressions would have been paid for, because they were at least half visible somewhere on the screens of these consumers for more than two seconds; technically visible but actually largely ignored. 

The data does not suggest that ad impressions on these platforms are completely worthless: they might nudge bottom-of-funnel purchase if targeted accurately and served to human beings (which we know is not always the case). But this is commercially less valuable than driving long-term growth. And when it comes to long-term growth, they are no substitute for those platforms that capture longer attention for our advertising. So it is vital that media planning takes full account of the attention paid to ads on different platforms and therefore their ability to build brands’ mental availability. But this has only recently become possible and it is now clear that the earlier basis on which ad impressions were bought did not reflect the true value of high attention platforms like TV.
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4: Not all Advertising Impressions are Equal

Until recently media planners had no data to enable them to value video advertising impressions served on different platforms. They were forced to accept the viewability currency of those platforms and assume that if an ad was viewable on platform A then it had the same value as if it was viewable on platform B. Data from Lumen and TVision reveal the extent to which that is untrue. Attention levels to advertising on Social Media platforms generally fall very rapidly with less than 10% of ‘viewers’ whose attention has been paid for still viewing the ad after 2.5 seconds, the critical threshold. With non-social video platforms such as YouTube, attention levels are much healthier with around a third of ‘viewers’ still watching at 2.5 seconds. And the performance of TV is even more healthy: between 50% and 60% of ‘viewers’ are still watching the ad at 2.5 seconds (depending on whether linear or streamed TV) and more than a quarter are still watching 10 seconds in. None of the non-TV video channels except Cinema come close to this: TV has a unique ability to deliver mass attention amongst a mass audience. This is hugely valuable.

Of course, this attention decay pattern would matter much less if the costs paid per thousand impressions (CPMs) across the various platforms reflected this radically different attention performance. But they do not by a long way, and so the exceptional value for money of TV has been obscured by the meaningless CPM currency.

5: The True Costs of Attention show TV to be much better value for money than other platforms

The rapid growth of advertising spend in online video, and especially social video, has been driven by the false sense of value-for-money created by the CPM currency that has dominated planning thus far. Viewed through the distorting lens of CPM, social video appears to be a no-brainer choice at a little over a quarter the cost of TV. This has strongly prejudiced marketers against TV and led to widespread defunding of TV companies, with no real justification.

By contrast, viewed through the clearer lens of cost per thousand attentive seconds (ACPM), TV becomes the true no-brainer choice at a little over a third the cost of social video. The ACPM hierarchy across the channels is more-or-less the opposite of the CPM hierarchy.

And impressive though this revaluation is for TV, it is likely an understatement of the true comparative value-for-money advantage that TV delivers, because the relationship between attention seconds per impression and mental availability is not linear, as we saw earlier. That is perhaps why the Ebiquity/Lumen report (Maximising Profit Through Attention) showed that ROI rises exponentially as ACPM falls.

But the advantages of TV do not end there. Nelson-Field’s research has identified the phenomenon of attention elasticity: on high attention platforms such as TV, strongly engaging commercials (usually emotive and creative) possess much greater scope to boost attention duration and therefore effectiveness than they do on low attention platforms. The golden key to growth is therefore to serve high attention creative on high attention platforms. But attention elasticity also means that the potential of high attention creative is largely negated when served on low attention platforms, denying marketers both levers of growth.

And this same attention lens should be used to correct yet another distorted perception of TV: how much advertising young adults actually see on TV. UK audience measurements suggest that 16-34s are served around 56% of their daily video advertising by TV (linear plus streamed). This alone comes as a surprise to many in marketing who believe that very few young adults watch TV. But of course, it underrepresents the true impact of TV advertising on young adults and if we apply the basic attention corrections it turns out that TV advertising accounts for almost 80% of their attentive video advertising viewing. For all adults, TV accounts for over 90% of attentive viewing. So, for mass-market brand owners and those with ambitions to become mass-market, TV is undoubtedly the most powerful media tool at your disposal.

Marketers should not therefore be surprised that large scale studies of market mix models (such as Profit Ability 2 conducted by Ebiquity and Gain Theory) continue to show that linear and streamed TV delivers the lion’s share (55%) of profit growth. In effectiveness databases such as the IPA’s, usage of TV and its share of proven effective advertising budgets are rock steady and much higher than in the wider market. 

I will finish with my best advice to any marketer reading this. It is in your own interest that you reassess any prejudices against TV you may hold and, if necessary, rebuild investment in what is a proven leading effectiveness platform. There are many case studies that demonstrate the transformative impact on growth and profitability of doing so. It’s likely to be the most effective decision you make.