The validity of online advertising as a tool for brand effectiveness has been bolstered by research from Nielsen Online and IAB Australia. The research which involved an extensive study of the online medium’s brand building potential, was conducted by Nielsen Online and centered around Kellogg’s brand Sultana Bran, media agency Mindshare, ad serving from Microsoft Advertising in addition to five online publishers; Fairfax Digital, News Digital Media, ninemsn, MediaSmart and Yahoo!7.
The research, which tapped into grocery buyers and children, revealed that the intention to purchase Sultana Bran increased by 37% across the whole sample and brand consideration increased 17.13% when consumers were exposed to the online ads versus a control group that was not exposed to any of the Sultana Bran creative online.
IAB Australia CEO Paul Fisher, said the results provide long awaited quantitative data for marketers to justify increases in their online advertising for brand building.
“Across the three key brand metrics – intention to purchase, brand awareness and recall – online advertising clearly demonstrated it has significant positive impacts for FMCG brands. Not only is this a significant result for online advertising, Kelloggs and all involved, it proves beyond any doubt that consumers are strongly influenced by online advertising in their brand purchase decisions,” he said.
Across the target audience intention to purchase increased 18.9%, favourable sentiment increased 11.7%, prompted brand awareness increased 6.2% and there was a 9.5% increase in respondents intending to recommend the cereal to children their household.
Kerry Field, National Director at Mindshare said that the simple message is that online really does work for branding. “We have seen similar studies from IAB in US but having concrete evidence with proof points at a local level is far more powerful.”
The study also found that even when the ad was not recalled, consumers still demonstrated a strong increase in intention to purchase.
“The online medium has long been lauded as purely a direct response medium. This study, along with the many other similar studies conducted internationally; clearly demonstrate the impact online advertising has on brand as well as direct response. Online can now be considered a complete solution for marketer’s needs, and the results deliver a compelling reason to increase the use of online advertising in marketing plans and budgets,” Fisher added.
While the research was isolated to an FMCG brand, Nielson Online associate research director Tony Marlow said that the results were consistent with previous proprietary research conducted into the brand impact of online display advertising across automotive, finance and retail categories.
“The findings should be an eye opener for many key players within the advertising and media space who will discover for the first time just how impactful the online medium can be for a brand,” Marlow said.
Fairfax Digital, News Digital Media, ninemsn, MediaSmart and Yahoo!7 each provided equal online inventory for this study to a value that would be considered average for an online brand building campaign. Ads were booked with a mix of contextual placement and general ROS and inventory, in standard IAB ad formats included medium rectangles, leader board, streaming video both as pre-roll ads to online video content and streaming video from medium rectangle ad placements, skyscrapers and half page formats.
View the full report here: www.iabaustralia.com.au
