If anyone contacts you from Dynamic Logic and tells you that you may have won a prize please be careful January 7, 2010
Posted by Mark Blei in : General announcments , add a commentDynamic Logic, Inc. has been made aware that unfortunately at this time, there are unscrupulous people who are currently using various methods to try and scam individuals out of money using the Dynamic Logic name. If you receive a check in the mail, an email from a Yahoo! or other type of email account, or a phone call stating that you have won something or asking you for information, please contact our main number at 212-844-3700 during normal east coast business hours, Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
Please assume that all contact, other than requests from Dynamic Logic that appear on the Internet asking you to participate in a survey, is a scam attempt. We are in the business of conducting online research surveys and have no mystery shopper programs, we sell no products, we do not mail out checks, and most drawings are for less than $1,000.00 US. To verify a real communication from Dynamic Logic, please call us directly during business hours and ask to speak with Mark Blei.
Meanwhile, during non-business hours, please forward any suspicious emails to privacy@dynamiclogic.com, and you may fax suspicious checks or postal mail you receive to 646-349-5769. Do not deposit any checks that you receive until you have spoken to us first. Dynamic Logic and its associated companies will never ask you to send a check balance or ask you to wire any form of money. Please contact us during business hours if you have any concerns.
Thank you!
Mark Blei
Dynamic Logic a Millward Brown Company.
Meet Amy Fayer Dynamic Logic Research Manager, Custom Solutions October 26, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , add a commentAcross my years as a researcher at Dynamic Logic, I can honestly claim that I am continuously learning new things on a daily basis and have always been inspired by those I work with. In my current position on the custom solutions team I have the opportunity to get involved in various client discussions across internal teams and help to design research solutions that fit with clients’ custom research needs. Aside from designing and executing custom research I also enjoy the opportunity to present DL research at public events and conferences. One of the industry conferences I recently attended was a tremendous and positive learning experience for me. I was selected to create and present an automotive best practices deck for an industry conference that a publisher client was sponsoring. I will admit that at first I was very overwhelmed about speaking at the event. This would be a conference where industry experts and thought leaders would be discussing success drivers of online auto marketing among OEMs, dealer associations and retail marketing. In my past experience I had worked on a few ad effectiveness studies for auto brands but did not consider myself to be an expert when it came to the auto vertical. However, I came to understand that the client was looking for a digital expert, not just an auto expert. They needed someone who could shed light on key campaign variables that drive online success for auto marketers.
The conference was organized to provide auto advertisers and agencies with further data and insights to help them make informed business decisions during the difficult economic climate. Dynamic Logic research was crucial to this conference because it helped to support the case that there is a current need in the online auto marketing industry to shift campaign measurement away from only examining behavioral metrics and incorporate attitudinal measurement as well. When creating the presentation, I examined trends in MarketNorms data related to the auto industry and actually learned more about automotive marketing in doing so. Because of the longer and somewhat more complex decision making process involved in purchasing a vehicle, automotive brands present unique challenges to online marketers. Exposure to an online ad is just one part of an extensive information search leading up to a vehicle purchase. However, online automotive ads can have an impact both by raising brand awareness and persuading consumers to consider a particular model. A few important things I learned about online auto advertising effectiveness included:
- In any online auto campaign, in-market status is crucial for impacting brand metrics, particularly purchase consideration.
- Context is important for online automotive advertising; auto ads on auto sites are particularly effective at driving brand opinions and consideration
- Contrary to popular belief, online campaigns for luxury automotive vehicles can have an impact on both awareness and persuasion metrics
- Automotive ads that are co-branded typically under perform on ad awareness and persuasion
Attending the conference also allowed me to learn a great deal about the auto marketing industry through seeing current research that was being conducted on vehicle shopping behaviors by other companies such as J.D. Power and Compete. An example of some research I found to be interesting was a research study conducted by Autotrader.com and Northwood University on the topic of advertising and volume of walk-in traffic at national dealerships. This research aimed to quantify how much walk-in traffic is driven by advertising and within advertising what types of media (online, print, etc.) drove the highest volume of traffic to both franchise and independent dealers. The results of the study indicated that advertising drives more dealer walk-in traffic than friends or family. It also showed that the Internet is the primary media source at driving dealer walk-in traffic among both new and used car shoppers. The differences between media sources were staggering. The Internet drives four times the traffic as newspaper, nearly seven times as much as TV, and thirteen and a half times that of radio.
My initial thoughts were that the conclusions of this research study provided a great complementary piece to the story line that the DL normative data aimed to provide. Online is a great space for auto marketers to be, as most target consumers are actively using the internet to research brands when in-market to purchase a new or used vehicle. However, MarketNorms data reveals that there are certain best practices that online auto marketers should adhere to in order to successfully build consumer attitudes towards the brand. We all know that the digital measurement front is rapidly changing. There is a growing need within the industry to utilize insights on brand metrics (consumer attitudes) coupled with research on in-market shopper behavior trends (consumer behaviors). For online auto marketers, having access to these types of research insights can guide the media planning process and potentially maximize return on marketing investment during difficult economic times.
Outside of working at Dynamic Logic, I fully enjoy spending time with friends and family, reading, antique shopping, running, travelling, dining out in NYC, and attending ballet performances and art exhibits.
Dynamic Logic Reveals Online Creative Best Practices: Register for Webinar October 20, 2009
Posted by dynamiclogicbeaty in : Uncategorized , add a commentComplete Findings of New Study to be Unveiled during Joint Webinar with AAAA’s on October 27
New York, October 20, 2009 – Millward Brown’s Dynamic Logic, the leader in measuring digital advertising effectiveness, announced today key findings from a new study that identifies creative best practices for driving online ad effectiveness and brand impact. This latest research offers agencies and marketers actionable advice for maximizing creative quality, which, according to Dynamic Logic, is the foremost driver of ad effectiveness – even more important than targeting, size or format.
“When it comes to digital advertising, a lot of time is spent choosing Web sites, ad sizes, formats, targeting and other factors,” said Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s SVP of Custom Solutions. “However, not enough time is spent producing and testing high quality ads. This study offers some basic principles for achieving better results.”
In fact, creative quality is not only important in driving critical brand metrics including brand favorability and purchase intent, Dynamic Logic found that the worst performing ads had the ability to negatively impact brand metrics, as seen in the chart below.
(Click image for larger version)
“Despite the fact that more advertising is moving online, we still see a shockingly large percentage of creative that falls short of its potential,” said Amy Fayer, Research Manager of Custom Solutions at Dynamic Logic. “Our analysis of over 170,000 online creative executions has allowed us to identify simple rules of thumb that can mean the difference between an exceptionally successful online ad versus one that can have an adverse effect on a brand.”
During the October 27th Webinar (to be held at 1:30 p.m. ET — registration details below), Dynamic Logic will provide examples of the best and worst performing ads by industry and reveal its complete list of Creative Best Practices, five of which are previewed here:
- The branding impact of an online campaign is only as strong as your brand presence: Seek to highlight the brand prominently on all frames of an ad. Intrigue is rarely a good strategy in online campaigns. Consistent branding presence will aid in greater impact on awareness metrics.
- Because you often only have a moment to influence a viewer, each frame of an ad should be able to stand on its own: Each frame should work to drive brand awareness, communicate message/ benefits/ differentiation, and provide reasons to purchase and/or a call to action.
- “Reveal” ads are almost always ineffective: This is seen across all industries as a key component that differentiates best and worst campaign performers. A few exceptions to this rule are video ads, which are much more likely to succeed in this format but are still risky, as well as ads with high entertainment or comedic value.
- Keep the messaging very simple: No more than two messages should be conveyed in an online campaign. For example, within financial services campaigns, ads that were cluttered with heavy copy/text tended to underperform on ad awareness. Within the pharmaceutical industry, formats that allow users to roll over or scroll down to see legal information (not conveyed cluttered in frame) perform better on awareness.
- The use of human imagery is important: Human imagery appears to be a key factor in the success of most online campaigns but in particular, among financial services ads which have traditionally been more text heavy and therefore less effective at building awareness and persuasion.
Webinar Details:
The AAAA’s and Dynamic Logic will hold a Webinar “Top 10 Ways of Maximizing Brand Impact,” which will review the complete findings of this study, on Tuesday, October 27 at 1:30 p.m. ET.
Follow this link to register: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/184121216.
Meet Jemma Toynebee-Smith October 9, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Uncategorized , add a commentHi, I’m Jemma Toynebee-Smith and I’m still the official ‘new girl’ here in London.
Over the past 6 months I have had a pretty intense baptism of fire, from learning the ropes at the project management side of the business, to now being where my actual experience sits, account management.
I made the move into market research – from a pretty varied background – as I wanted to work in an industry that I’m actually interested in!
I love how we, as a society are so totally influenced by media, and therefore the advertising that comes with it. Whether it’s our slightly warped view on the ‘perfect female form’, or which mobile phone provider to choose, we are constantly bombarded by images, messages and advertising…and I’m utterly fascinated by how we sub consciously take away and process all of these messages, and make our choice based upon this.
For me, digital is by far the most fascinating of all these media’s – just down to the fast pace of change, and how we, as a society, interact so much more with digital!
On a slightly more personal note – I hail from a very small town in the middle of England, but have had the pleasure of living in numerous places, including Paris for 3 years, Sydney for 9 months, and lots of various places in England…until I met my husband and settled around London.
I also absolutely love shoes!
Dynamic Logic Translates Purchase Intent into Estimated Sales with Conversion Index September 22, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Sales and Marketing , add a comment
We are pleased to announce the official launch of our ROI-driven solution — Conversion Index. Conversion Index allows our clients to further understand the branding impact of their campaigns by translating Purchase Intent into estimated sales.
In today’s economy, as the need for ROI grows, our clients often want a metric closer to actual sales. Through Conversion Index, an add-on to brand studies, clients can quantify impact of a digital advertising campaign by converting a Purchase Intent delta into an estimate of actual purchase or other KPI measures.
Conversion Index can be ideal for estimating sales impact of established or new products, line extensions, new formulations, etc. and can offer insight in these areas and more:
- How many people who say they are going to buy my product actually do?
- How many incremental purchasers were there? Incremental purchases?
- Where did I source my incremental purchases from? New customers? Existing customers?
- How can I convert a non-sales event, like intent to go see a doctor, into actual behavior?
To learn more about how Conversion Index can help you convert Purchase Intent into estimated sales, contact sales@dynamiclogic.com
Mention you saw it here firs,t and you wil win a prize ofl all the Chinese food menus that have been randomly stuck under our doors in the last seven years.
Christopher Bian Looks Behind the Scenes of the Not-So-Big Screen September 21, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , add a commentHave you seen the latest “epic fail” video on YouTube? There’s an app for that.
Missed last night’s episode of “Lost”? Check out the Hulu link tweeted by @Lost_on_ABC.
Is it time for President Obama’s latest speech on healthcare reform? The CNN homepage is streaming it live.
Any way you cut it, video content, syndicated or not, is now readily available almost anywhere, or on anything that has an internet connection. The capability of today’s technology is a wide departure from several years ago, when “YouTube” had yet to become daily vernacular and “pre-roll” was all the rage. Now, you couldn’t run from a video stream even if you tried. But what does this mean for the world of media? Does the fact that I can stream a feature-length movie from Netflix onto my Playstation 3 to watch on my HDTV really provide marketers yet another way to hawk their wares? More importantly, “Do I want them to?”
As the methods and vehicles to consume online video become increasingly accessible, viewership of online video will move from access through a computer as it humbly began, to integrated mobile devices, gaming consoles, and even television sets. Consumption is changing; not necessarily how much, but how. I see 3 factors that play into the consumption shift:
1- Internet video usage – Viewership has increased over 12% in the last year, to nearly 134M users, compared to a .9% increase to 284M traditional TV viewers.
2- Timeshifted TV – Approximately 30% of US households own a DVR recorder and hour usage per month has increased 19.5% since the past year.
3- Video on mobile phones – while usage remains relatively low at 15M users this year, this is a 70% increase over 2008, keeping in mind mobile phones do not comprise all mobile devices capable of, or used for video.
Overall internet video usage is up, as is demand for timeshifted TV, which is an inherent characteristic of internet video. Each of these represents a separate trend, which may or may not be correlated, but serve as a guide to the direction in which consumption habits are heading. The widespread penetration of video-enabled mobile devices provides readily available “supply”, as consumers have access to video with relative ease. Nearly two-thirds of Americans ages 13 to 54 have at least one mobile device capable of video. Perhaps the most common video-enabled device, laptops are owned by 57% of Americans. Over one in five have a video-enabled iPod. Perhaps most markedly, 42% of users of all devices claim to use a mobile device to actually watch video.
Granted, there are key differences among the media used by consumers, such as consumption of long form vs. short form video, time spent watching with each medium, etc., but the point is that the evolution of video consumption is certainly not insubstantial, and quite the contrary. As these habits grow and change along with the technology that enables them, eventually, some will become the standard.
So how does one add value to consumer marketing initiatives? Guessing is one option, though probably not preferred or recommended. Consumer desires and pet peeves can be fleeting; what works one moment can change as the industry yet again shifts in another direction. Chalk it up to the quick pace at which our industry evolves! Consumers grow increasingly savvy, empowered by the internet. Gone are the days of passively watching commercials. Today’s consumers are not only engaging on a daily basis with one another, but with brands – something previously unheard of. Media plans are changing to incorporate the expanding marketing repertoire, such as social, viral, mobile, as well as video components. In order to harness the interplay of these efficiently, the approach to take is akin to tuning a musical instrument: pluck a string and listen for feedback; adjust accordingly; rinse, repeat. This does not mean your first foray into emerging media is a blind stab in the dark, nor should it be cause for you to fear utilizing it. This is where research comes into play; ensuring your approach provides you with information that can give you actionable, post-operative insights is crucial to long-term branding success.
Granted, not all parameters of your campaign, such as budget constraints, can allow for costly research. On the other hand, external normative data provides access to a wealth of information at a fraction of the cost. Based on consistently aggregated data, it can not only help guide campaigns in the planning stages toward the best chance of success, but it can be used after the fact to help diagnose issues, or explore any additional questions that may arise.
The following graphs and tables use creative format data from the MarketNorms® database. Using the entertainment industry as an example, video units typically outperform rich media units on awareness, isolated at an exposure of 1; however, rich media may be the better performer when it comes to Purchase Intent. Included below is a calculator that gives a potential cost-effectiveness scenario that not only reinforces this idea, but provides evidence that rich media may also be less expensive to impact each person. This calculator tool populates with MarketNorms® data, allowing for comparisons across various creative attributes, which can be particularly valuable in the planning stages of a campaign. A simple tool such as this can aid in controlling costs in the long run, freeing up resources to focus on the campaign’s value-driven proposition.
Source: Dynamic Logic MarketNorms®
Entertainment Industry ,Rich Media, frequency of 1: Last 3 Years, Q2/2009, N=35, n=46,396
Entertainment Industry, Video, frequency of 1: Full Dataset; N=20, n=29,798
Analysis Adjusted for Frequency
The upside to normative data can also be its downside; it needs to be collected over a length of time, and in a consistent, comparable manner. This takes considerable effort and time, not to mention financial investment. In the end, the best way to market to the consumer is to do it with the best tools available. Research is never the magic 8-ball we hope for. In this case, it’s more like a compass that’s pointing in the direction we should go, but it’s up to us to go out there, traverse the terrain, and gather data along the way, but with a long term goal in mind. Video can be great as a centerpiece or supplement to any campaign; normative research is the tool to help give it the best chance to succeed.
Sources:
1- Nielsen three screen report, Q2/2009
2- http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=112822
3- Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms® database, Q2/2009
If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you. We invite you to call us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here
Research Operations Manager Scott Kresge talks about the unique aspects of operating on a global scale September 4, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , add a commentWith a degree in computer science as well as cognitive psychology, I’ve always enjoyed pushing around large collections of data particularly when they involve human behavior and demographics.
When I go to the office I live the vicarious life of a virtual tourist. Rather than stepping off a plane or a ship and being immersed in a different culture, I am exposed to a cacophony of out-of-context snapshots of other cultures every work day.
One of my first eye opening experiences in managing Global Operations was a study being run in China. I was keeping an eye on the recruitment levels as it went infield just out of curiosity. The number of survey respondents exploded instantly and grew at speeds that we would never see in the U.S. My first thought was to shut the survey down. Surely we were breaking some agreement with the publishers by commandeering all the available advertising real estate and then inviting every single visitor to take a survey. I naively envisioned 1.3 billion Chinese poised over their keyboards happily waiting to pounce on the next available survey.
Mercifully, one of my counterparts in Beijing explained what I was seeing. It’s not uncommon in China for even some the largest of portal sites to “lease out” their entire site to a single entity or a small group. For all practical purposes, you own all branding rights and advertising real estate on the site. There’s a catch of course. You can only “own” it for a few days at most. Imagine owning all the advertising real estate and data collection rights on a site like Yahoo.com or AOL.com…even for just a few hours.
Here are a few examples of some of those out-of-context, cultural snapshots. I’ve identified them by language since country borders are becoming less and less meaningful in the brave new internet landscape.
Chinese – Seeing this survey throws me every time I see it. This survey involves one of the largest American entertainment icons and is instantly recognizable by probably 99+% of Americans and here it’s mixed with a language that I imagine less than 1% of Americans can decipher. I find it pleasantly disorienting.
Russian – I was born into an era when the Soviet Union was planting nuclear missiles on Cuba and Nikita Khrushchev was saying “We will bury you!” (apparently speaking figuratively to capitalism in general). Now I’m helping to execute a study to determine how well the marketing efforts of one the largest American chip manufacturers are going in Russia.
Arabic – Written Arabic is a visually beautiful language. Of course, I wouldn’t even recognize it as a language of any kind if someone didn’t tell me it was so. In addition to the translation issue, Arabic has the additional technical challenge of being written and read from right to left.
I’ve presented three glimpses of data collection across three very different regions and cultures. To paraphrase a saying; the more things change, the more they remain the same. I won’t bore you with numerical results but you can take comfort from the fact that out of this cultural chaos comes one global truth: If you expose people from any culture to enough advertising, it’s going to affect their attitudes and behaviors
I’ll leave it to the advertisers and the philosophers to decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing.
- Scott Kresge
Research Operations Manager – Global
If you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you. No matter if you’re in New York, London, Paris Munich or anywhere else . We invite you to learn more by calling us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!
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Dynamic Logic Study for redbox Reveals That In-Call Media Can Be Highly Effective For Raising Brand Awareness and Purchase Intent September 1, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Dynamic Logic Press Release , add a comment
Purchase likelihood increased almost 11 percentage points among occasional DVD renters following ad exposure
NEW YORK CITY, September 1, 2009 — As more marketers begin to leverage mobile display advertising (e.g., WAP display, mobile applications or SMS) as part of their media mix, new research suggests that audio ads deliver branding impact that marketers should take note of. Dynamic Logic, Safecount and VoodooVox — leading innovators in mobile measurement, recruitment and media, respectively — have teamed up on a new study to explore the branding effects of In-Call Media, the insertion of audio ads directly into the call stream of a targeted consumer. According to their research, In-Call Media can have a strong influence on both brand awareness and intent.
In the study, Dynamic Logic measured the branding impact of an In-Call Media promotional campaign for redbox, a subsidiary of Coinstar, Inc. and provider of fully automated kiosks featuring $1 per night new release DVDs. Results demonstrate that exposure to the redbox messages increased Aided Brand Awareness by over 9 percentage points among overall respondents — a significant increase for the brand and higher than typically seen with Dynamic Logic’s mobile display norms. Furthermore, among respondents whom occasionally rent DVDs, the campaign increased those saying they were very likely to rent from a redbox kiosk by almost 11 percentage points (10.7%).
“Dynamic Logic has always put a strong focus on digital innovation and marketing insight; therefore, we’re continuously working with clients to measure their newest mobile and new media marketing efforts,” says Ali Rana, vice president, digital strategy at Dynamic Logic. “As demonstrated by these results, In-Call Media can provide an opportunity for marketers to explicitly communicate brand propositions to an engaged audience while in a relevant mindset.”
The campaign was executed through VoodooVox, whose In-Call Advertising Network serves upwards of 100 million ads a month across dozens of call sources. In the campaign, callers who were on hold for a popular toll-free movie ticket line heard a variety of 10-second messages about redbox in an effort to build awareness and encourage trial of their movie kiosks. Interested callers could engage further to hear more or get a text message coupon.
“In-Call Media provides brands a targeted way to reach and engage consumers. On ad-sponsored services like movie ticket lines and dozens of other call publishers, advertisers continue to reap the benefits of the In-Call Media. It’s simply a highly effective way to engage the mobile consumer” said Gregory Wester, COO of VoodooVox.
Safecount, who led recruitment and data collection, usedVoodooVox’s In-Call Media technology to survey callers. Callers who opted-in received an SMS text message with instructions to access the telephone survey. VoodooVox’s technology identified which survey respondents had been exposed to the audio ads, and Dynamic Logic’s control-exposed research methodology was used to determine the overall impact on respondents who heard the redbox advertising.
Other findings from the study:
- Awareness of the redbox brand significantly increased after just one exposure to the advertising — it takes the average online campaign ten or more exposures to generate a similar increase, according to Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms.*
- Direct communication of brand attributes in the audio ads, combined with multiple ad exposures, led to significant increases in respondents’ agreement that redbox is “the easiest way to rent a movie” and “the best value” among DVD renters.
- Among “Frequent DVD Renters,” Aided Brand Awareness increased 11.9%.
The redbox campaign was targeted to mobile phone users and ran throughout the month of December 2008, delivering 900,000 audio ad impressions during this time.
* NOTE: While the same control/exposed methodology is utilized, online MarketNorms is comprised of data collected via online interviews; therefore, different surveying techniques may play a role in differences when comparing to the redbox campaign.
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About Dynamic Logic
Dynamic Logic helps clients build brands and meet ROI objectives by providing marketing insight across all digital platforms and the broader media mix. As a Millward Brown company, Dynamic Logic offers advertisers, agencies and publishers the unique combination of world-class expertise on brand building and media coupled with normative insights from its database of thousands of digital campaigns, the largest in the industry. Founded in 1999, Dynamic Logic pioneered online ad measurement and has grown with the digital age, developing innovations across 27 digital platforms and establishing specialty practices in cross-media, social media, mobile, gaming and custom solutions. Responding to an industry need for data integration, Dynamic Logic established DLConnects™, a suite of solutions that provides clients synthesized insights from multiple sources including attitudinal, post-view behavioral, sales and tracking data. www.dynamiclogic.com
About Safecount
Safecount is a leading digital survey recruitment and data collection company that is dedicated to improving transparency for consumers, publishers and researchers. Having performed over 4,000 online studies for several clients, our patented live web recruitment technology delivers between 2 and 3 million respondents per year. This recruitment and data collection approach, as well as our online tracking technology, is available now to all research companies.www.safecount.net
About VoodooVox
VoodooVox is the leading provider of In-Call media, specializing in targeted insertion of ad-supported audio content into automated phone services, prepaid calling cards, directory assistance and other call streams.
Contact Information:
Vijay Chattha
For VoodooVox
tel: 415-305-6041
vijay@vscconsulting.com
Sara Beaty
Dynamic Logic
tel: 212-844-3743
sarab@dynamiclogic.com
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Article by Dynamic Logic's Ken Mallon: To GRP or not to GRP? August 26, 2009
Posted by steng in : Ken Mallon , add a comment
To GRP or not to GRP? Is online branding broken? These are questions facing Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer and the industry as a whole. Geoff recently commented on The Great GRP Debate, in his July 13, 2009 article. Also, in July, eMarketer published Online Brand Measurement: Connecting the Dots, based on industry interviews.
The continually debated issue is around metrics, metrics, metrics. What are the correct metrics? Are some better than others? Some claim online measurement is a mess. Is it?
GRPs are important … with a caveat
Why are GRPs important? Well, two reasons. First, many large companies use GRPs as inputs to media allocation and other models. They depend on these models to understand the impact advertising in each media is having. Although there are other and, sometimes more cost-effective, methods for evaluating the independent and synergistic effects of advertising across different media, these GRP modeling approaches have been in place for many years and change is difficult.
Second, GRPs are constructed based on reach and frequency. Reach is important because it’s an input to another important formula: impacted reach = reach times ad effectiveness. More on impacted reach in a moment.
So, in the GRP debate, I’m on the GRP side with a caveat. I think reach is critical to determining overall impact or impacted reach, as I call it, of a campaign, but GRPs may over-simply the reach concept.
GRPs over-simplify the concept of reach, especially online.
If you have reach and frequency, you can calculate GRPs, but GRPs are an over-simplification. Here is why. In the online world, there is a big difference in impact between delivering 10 million impressions to 5 million people versus delivering 10 million impressions to 2 million people. They can both represent the same number of GRPs, but the impacted reach of the latter example is far less.
The table below steps through the math as to why this is so. This concept can be illustrated for any measure of perception or with sales data. In this example, I chose brand favorability as the perception metric and the data come from the Dynamic Logic MarketNorms database. I looked at three different exposure frequency groups: those that saw ads from a given campaign exactly once, those who saw 2-3 ads and those who saw 4 or more ads. The data are aggregated across 71 campaigns. Those who saw 2-3, had an average exposure of 2.3 and those who saw 4+, had an average exposure of 10.2.
From the above example, one can clearly see that the total effectiveness or impacted reach, in the three scenarios, is vastly different even though the number of impressions, which are the closest things we have to GRPs, are the same. I went into more detail on this in an i-Media connection article two years ago. Note how dramatically reach decreases at different frequency levels. The reach among the 4+ group is less than 1/10th of the reach in the single frequency group. The impact, on a percentage basis, is higher in the high exposure group (2.7% became favorable to the tested brand who otherwise would not have been, versus <2% in the <4 exposure groups) but the loss in reach cannot be made up and shows itself in the impacted reach calculation.
The problem of having similar GRPs associated with vastly different impact is less of a problem offline. In the offline world, once you choose, for example, a magazine, TV show or other offline channel, the range of possible frequencies is somewhat limited. Online, someone can see your ad dozens or even hundreds of times.
More on impacted reach and ad effectiveness
Impacted reach is the number of people impacted by a particular ad campaign. And, I believe that in 90% of cases, impact boils down to one of two things. For an ad campaign to be considered effective, in any media, it has to either change people’s perceptions about your brand or product or it has to drive incremental sales or both.
So, ad effectiveness = changes in perceptions + sales impact. Ad effectiveness is not about ad interaction, clicking, driving traffic, etc. These post-view behaviors can be very important diagnostically, but I don’t think they belong in the ad effectiveness equation. I’d put them in the category of very important diagnostic information. They’d be in the same category as finding out if someone read the newspaper circular or finding out if someone noticed an end-aisle display. They are important and can help you understand what went wrong when perceptions and/or sales are not impacted, but they aren’t endpoints in themselves. This is why Dynamic Logic launched AdIndex Connects with Compete so that we can now provide enhanced post-view behavioral data in addition to the attitudinal and sales impact metrics. It’s a very valuable layer of insights.
Is brand impact measurement broken?
Now to the issue of online brand impact measurement. Is it broken? In the eMarketer Brand Measurement article, there is a nice section citing Dynamic Logic MarketNorms data. It shows that, on average, online advertising lifts brand metrics. But, it also shows that there is great variability in results and that the bottom 20% of online ad campaigns actually have negative impact on perception.
Based on our further research, the biggest driver of success versus failure is the quality of the ads. So, we believe that in-market optimization of ads should not be based on click rates or interaction rates but, rather, on creative quality. Conducting a copy test before or early on in the campaign, can have a huge positive impact on results.
So, we do not believe online branding is broken and neither is measurement. Advertisers conduct thousands of research projects per year that include brand impact measurement as part of the accountability of the campaign. It is not too difficult to also compute impacted reach and ROI metrics such as impacted reach per dollar spent. Advertisers who focus on good creative tend to be more successful and we support folks like the Online Publishers Association who are pushing the envelope by launching new ad formats that more closely mirror magazine advertising.
Thanks, eMarketer for the continued great articles. Look forward to commenting more in the future.
Ken Mallon
SVP Custom Solutions
Dynamic Logic
Meet Meg Reardon August 25, 2009
Posted by markblei in : Staff posts , add a commentRecently we began a new feature where we introduce you to a few new staff members at Dynamic Logic every week . Here they will discuss their specialties, new challenges they may have faced and how the challenges were overcome, interesting projects they have worked on and new things that they have learned.
We hope that it will serve as a vehicle to allow you to get to know us better and through this to have a better understanding of our capabilities and the types of unique challenges we meet head on everyday.
Hi! My name is Meg Reardon and I’m the Research Director for the Chicago office. I just finished working on one of the most interesting projects of my career. As a psychology major, any time I can combine market research with neuroscience, it really gets my nerd-blood pumping! And that’s just what this project did. We had an opportunity to create a website experience study for a major retailer, and partner with EmSense to provide additional diagnostic information on the website performance from a neuroscience perspective. How it worked was that we at DL conducted a more ‘traditional’ quantitative study among panelists who asked to evaluate the retailer & competitive websites. They were also sent to the client website and further probed about their visit. Concurrently, EmSense conducted research in where respondents are recruited to a central location and adorned with a headset & eye-tracking equipment. They were then asked to visit the client (and a competitive) website. The headset is able to measure biosensory data around the respondent’s cognitive and emotional response to the website. Combined with the eye-tracking information, we are then able to understand what elements of the website are eliciting what cognitive/emotional response. In the end, we combined our research with the biosensory information from EmSense to provide a very rich, evaluative and diagnostic look at the website experience for our client. And, while in this case the focus was on a website evaluation, I think there are many, many ways this partnership can be put to good use in solving our client’s research issues – one the most obvious of which is copy-testing. Outside of work, I enjoy spending time with my family (My husband Chris, daughter Evelyn (2) and daughter Molly (3 months)) and friends, working out and eating (hence the need to enjoy working out!).
f you’re interested in how Dynamic Logic can help your next campaign perform optimally for you. We invite you to call us at 212-844-3700 or email us at answers (at) dynamic logic (dot) com. Tell them that you read about us here!
