Top performing online campaigns need branding objectives Article here

Dynamic Logic recently announced the most effective online advertising campaigns, based on research that evaluated how well each campaign achieved its branding objectives. Reviewing the campaigns measured in the US and the UK during 2006, Suzanne Moorey-Denham, managing director, Europe of Dynamic Logic discusses the top overall campaigns, which successfully generated the greatest branding impact.

Top UK campaigns

The top UK campaigns, which evaluated over 100 campaigns that also included some European advertising, represented a wide variety of brands and categories, including travel, FMCG, automotive and entertainment. Brands included two cinema campaigns for Adrift and The Sentinel, which utilised video as part of the campaigns’ assets. Also among the top performers were online travel site Opodo, Colgate’s Palmolive for Men, Philips Streamium Wireless Music Center, Sheila’s Wheels, Kraft’s Tassimo, Volkswagen Jetta and Yahoo! Search. On average, advertising for entertainment brands, such as films or television programmes, consistently generate higher average branding scores as compared to other categories. This is partly due to the very nature of these campaigns; they are fun to watch and often include clips of the film and celebrity actors as part of the adverts. However; the mix of product categories represented within the top campaigns, shows that many brands are successfully using online advertising.

These campaigns produced Online Advertising Awareness scores ranging from 8-20 percentage-point increases, which, interestingly, is notably lower than the scores for the top US campaigns. This may not be surprising, and may partly explain the difference in performance, since a majority of the top US campaigns used online video as a creative unit.

Previous Dynamic Logic research has shown that online video adverts can effectively cut through the clutter, yielding higher awareness for brands on average compared to other ad formats and online advertising in general. As online video becomes more commonplace on sites in the UK and across Europe, more agencies may begin to implement video elements as part of their campaign, driving higher average ad recall increases.

Many of the top online campaigns were well-integrated with their offline campaigns, including Sheila’s Wheels, allowing people to more easily recognise and connect with the brands.

The adverts also included a combination of rich media elements and various ad formats, including some lively home-page placements which captured visitors’ attention, but did not disrupt their experience enough to have a negative impact on the brands. The top performing campaigns tended to find the right balance between grabbing and holding people’s attention and having a positive effect without harming their user experience.

Top US campaigns

Among those ads measured in the US, the top campaigns were led by FMCG products, including four Kraft campaigns: Oreo, Honey Bunches of Oats, Kraft Singles and Crystal Light On-the-Go. These campaigns dominate the top performers partly because they have had a particularly innovative approach to online over the past few years. By conducting research and testing campaigns, marketers can learn and refine their process, incorporating learnings from one, informing and improving the creative and planning aspects of future campaigns.

Other brands that also achieved high scores were BMW, Dove, McDonald’s, and Ray-Ban. Online Ad Awareness scores for these campaigns ranged from 18-43 percentage-point increases after exposure to online advertising. The ads were also highly persuasive, generating the highest scores in Brand Favourability and Purchase Intent.

The value of video

As noted earlier, most of the US campaigns utilised some form of video ads as part of their online campaign. Video ads can provide a successful format to communicate to consumers. Many of the video ads appearing among the top campaigns happened to be repurposed TV spots that were adapted for online, and also implemented a variety of video formats, including pre-roll, in-banner and interstitial ads. Companion units were placed near the video, allowing viewers to interact with the ads and maintaining constant brand presence while the videos were playing.

These campaigns illustrate smart media strategy and clever but simple creativity, providing some great examples of what online adverts are working well. They also illustrate some guidelines in creating successful online brand advertising that other marketers may be able to learn from and apply. Following are some best practices that can be gleaned from the top performing campaigns:

• Keep the message simple. Don’t try to convey too many messages with your online advertising
• Be sure the brand is intrinsically linked to the creative assets
• The online campaign should be synergistic with the offline campaign
• For products, make the product shot the “hero” of the ad. Showing the prepared product or people using the product helps to demonstrate its benefits and also grabs viewers’ attention
• Leverage the unique capabilities of the Internet, such an interaction, layered roll-over units, and precise targeting

The research was conducted using AdIndex while each campaign was running live across the websites that made up the actual media plan. These campaigns were the most noticed, generating the highest Online Ad Awareness scores after exposure to the online campaign; they resulted in positive increases in awareness of the brand or product being advertised and were also highly persuasive.