Thoughts On: Magnifying media
Read Magnifying Media to discover how advertisers and their media agencies can make sure they are really getting bang for their buck from their ad spend.
Magnifying Media
How brands can thrive in the
new age of digital advertising
COVID-19:
Adapting to the coronavirus effect
Adapting to the coronavirus effect
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our lifestyles and, in turn, our media consumption. This is a source of both challenges and opportunities for brands and media agencies who must be quick and nimble to adapt to behaviours which are changing rapidly as we settle into post-lockdown life.
In some cases, the overall picture looks remarkably stable - for example, the proportion of the population watching live TV has grown just one percentage point compared with before lockdown. But if you dig under the surface, there are bigger shifts happening among specific demographic groups which point to these risks and opportunities.
Counter to the historical trend, much of the growth in live TV viewership can be attributed to younger age groups, with a particularly big swing among those under 35s who had previously not watched any live TV at all. This presents an exciting opportunity for advertisers to target a notoriously difficult to reach audience. That said, this age group tends to be lighter users of TV, so targeting them at the right moment, on the right channel, will be key.
With many workers still doing their jobs from home, commutes have reduced to zero in a lot of cases. Accordingly, we find the share of people reporting they take the train for at least an hour a day during the week has reduced by three percentage points and travel by bus is down by seven percentage points. This has huge knock-on effects in terms of exposure to out of home ads like billboards, and advertisers will need to think strategically about how to target those audiences in a different way – for example by placing ads in targeted areas, such as around consumers’ homes.
Another challenge comes from the rise of subscription services. The share of Britons watching TV via streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video is up seven percentage points compared with prior to lockdown, with younger households representing the heaviest users. This poses a challenge to advertisers, because while streaming platforms do offer the potential for highly targeted, personalised advertising, there are fewer opportunities than on other channels.
A counterbalance to this is the fact that we’re now spending more time on social media – offering another route for brands to target valuable consumers. The number of us using social media in any given week has increased by three percentage points, with that growth being driven by under 35s, and particularly by heavy users (those using social media for seven hours or more per week).
It’s clear, then, that the effect of the pandemic has been to accelerate our adoption of digital channels but also, perhaps unexpectedly, to give a boost to traditional broadcast media. Timely insight into how your target audience is consuming media, and when, will give you an understanding of the texture and nuances hidden under the surface and give you best chance of getting your advertising in front of the right people at the right time.
Targeting consumers
There are more ways to reach consumers than ever before. How can brands get organised for the chaos of modern day media and target their ad investment?
Much like our shopping habits, the way we consume media has been transformed over the past 30 years. The days of traditional platforms like TV dominating our intake are gone, the volume of online and digital streaming advertising space available has exploded, and what was previously accepted wisdom is now up for debate.
While this means plenty of new opportunities for brands to market their products, it also presents challenges. As more and more platforms and ways to speak to people emerge, how do brands cut through and ensure they’re investing in the right campaigns on the right channels at the right time?
Knowledge is key. This means understanding how those channels – from digital advertising on social media, to on-demand streaming services, traditional print and broadcast, radio and outdoor spaces – interact with each other and influence different shoppers.
Reader poll:
Which channel do you think will impact your performance the most
in 2021?
- Digital platforms
- Print media
- Outdoor
- Radio
- TV
- Direct mail
Winning the growth challenge
It boils down to cause and effect. Sales and brand growth may be the ultimate goal – and this is firmly grounded in the ability to attract new shoppers – but how can retailers and manufacturers make sure they are really getting bang for their buck from their ad spend?
The real value of a campaign is only clear when we look at its sales impact – invariably the result of increased penetration – separate from other factors like seasonality, brand loyalty and promotions.
We believe rules and patterns exist in behavioural data describing how people around the world choose and use the brands they do.
Understanding these rules and patterns is key to winning the growth challenge.
Doing this relies on using a sophisticated Consumer Media Measure (CMM), analysing buying habits to see how much and in what way advertising campaigns influence shopper purchases and attract additional buyers to the brand.
In turn, this can inform the planning for future programmes so that brands learn from previous investment to keep improving sales.
The Consumer Media Measure
Helping FMCG advertisers understand how media work, both together and separately, by analysing impact on real purchase behaviours during and after the campaign.
Hear more on how the Consumer Media Measure (also known as Consumer Mix Model) works, with Gwladys Hall, GB Head of Media, Kantar.
Prepare to succeed
Growth comes through shopper acquisition.
Plan who you will target, where you will find them, and how you will measure success.
Successful advertising relies on asking the right questions. The first is who to target. Of course, reaching the right audience is fundamental – even the best campaigns will fall on deaf ears if those ears belong to the wrong person. But who to target – and how – isn’t always clear.
For most brands, the strategic goal of a campaign will be based on recruiting new buyers. To do this, we need to understand who buys what, when and why. Even where a campaign carries other objectives, for example to increase loyalty or engage with specific markets, the same principles ring true – how an ad affects shoppers’ decisions is the crucial question.
Reach the right people with Kantar’s Audiences
Even age and demographic mapping here only gives us half the story – certain customers will inevitably fall through the gaps and focusing on those factors in isolation will produce some false targets.
On their own, demographics often tend towards generalisation, however, combined with actual shopper behavioural data, they start to carry some weight. Our Audiences platform allows us to draw full behavioural pictures and profiles, with targets based on people’s past purchases from all retailers and all channels.
Finding the right targets
How Kantar helped one advertising campaign achieve success
Kantar Audiences in action
Using actual purchase data for media targeting to generate brand and sales lifts
This Audiences example shows the impact the targeting method had on the campaign, contributing to an uplift in sales three times that of a typical campaign, and an increase in brand awareness which was twice the average.
An impactful and creative advert will always be needed to draw customers in, but through specific targeting, based on shoppers’ historic, objective activity, we can make sure that message reaches a captive audience.
The Challenge
Tate & Lyle, a global provider of food and beverage solutions, wanted to own ‘breakfast moments’ by making its golden syrup the go-to breakfast topping. Its campaign focused on how “ridiculously simple and wonderfully tasty” porridge can be by adding Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Kantar supported Tate & Lyle’s media agency, m/SIX, to engage consumers through Facebook who were already buying porridge.
The campaign's performance was measured against brand and sales uplift. It outperformed all benchmarks for FMCG campaigns.
The Approach
To reach the target audience, Kantar identified several key targets based on the purchase panel: heavy and medium porridge buyers, instant porridge sachet buyers and heavy and medium traditional porridge oats buyers. These targets were matched, extended and onboarded into Facebook through LiveRamp, allowing m/SIX to address the campaign based on these segments.
Targeted Audience boosted campaign
The campaign performance was measured against brand and sales uplift. It achieved significantly above all FMCG benchmarks*:
The campaign performance was measured against brand and sales uplift. It achieved results significantly above all FMCG benchmarks*:
*First three benchmarked against Facebook brand lift benchmarks. Last is benchmarked from Kantar UK CMM benchmarks.
Finding the balance
Media channels don't work in isolation, objectively harness their combined power
If who to target is the first question – the next is where. While for many people print media and direct mail aren’t their daily reading choices, for others they are still the most frequently used channels.
Meanwhile, digital platforms have not only introduced new opportunities for advertising space, it has also unlocked revolutionary ways of tracking people’s activity and exposure to FMCG campaigns. That said while the temptation can often be to default to digital platforms, because of their supposed ease of targeting and capturing metrics, these aren’t always the channels with the best reach.
People exposed to both digital platform ads and TV ads at the same time are 38% more likely to buy
When deciding which channels to prioritise, the short answer is, as ever, it depends. Based on who the target is, and how we want them to buy, the best way of dividing spend across different platforms will vary. This is where the CMM comes in. By analysing shoppers – and their spend – both before and after a campaign, the measure helps FMCG advertisers to understand how different forms of media really work and interact and the influence they have on actual purchases.
The intention is to ensure the different channels of a campaign are balanced, and to maximise how they operate collaboratively. It isn’t necessarily the case that attributing more spend to TV means the digital platform portion of the campaign will have less funding and be less fruitful. Often, advertising on one channel increases the effectiveness of another – one plus one can equal three or four or more.
Reaping what you sow
Do you enter into a campaign planning for the right contribution from media and trade activity?
The framework for a successful campaign is self-fulfilling. Planning is based on the evidence of previous campaigns, and evaluating success is impacted by preparation earlier in the process.
This means that accurately recording the results of a campaign is critically important, as is looking beyond raw numbers simply for their own sake. Click-through rates and other metrics can be helpful to give an indication of engagement, but what really matters is how a campaign influences people’s habits and the impact that has on a brand’s bottom line.
Through analysing real buying habits, we can evaluate how media worked through different channels by measuring their impact on sales during and after a campaign, both in the short term and the long.
Uplift per 1000 households on FMCG campaigns
Of course, a host of other factors also make a difference. For large brands, existing loyalty typically reserves space in both customers’ minds and on retailers’ shelves, helping to maintain sales independent of advertising campaigns. Similarly, promotional activity can be immensely powerful in the short term and often dwarf the impact of media events. To muddy the waters further, over-zealous advocacy of advertising can mean that marketers occasionally overstate its impact and exaggerate its role in promotional success. But using a CMM allows us to measure media-driven sales separately from those other components, and isolate the impact a campaign has had on new shoppers and in increasing penetration.
Source of brand sales during a typical campaign
The shopper is king
Put the laws of brand growth at the heart of campaigns
When planning and buying media campaigns, the target shopper needs to be every brand’s priority. It sounds obvious, but the reality is it often isn’t the case. Retailers and FMCG manufacturers should use the CMM to help them focus on the consumer and make shoppers their absolute focal point, both when identifying who to track and in demonstrating the impact that a campaign has had.
The scope and potential of media and advertising has expanded dramatically, and with more and more opportunities to reach people, brands have to take a progressive and technology-based approach to use that fact to their advantage. Those that don’t will inevitably fall behind.
The advertising sector is changing dramatically, and the technology we use to plan and measure media campaigns is modernising just as fast. As the rules of the game continue to evolve, brands should see this as an opportunity to make real gains – but they must be willing to adapt their approach to get things right.
Hear more from Kerry Corke, Global Media Director at Kantar, on why brands need to consider the role of advertising in reaching more shoppers.
Methodology
Real behaviour through consumer panels
This paper’s insights are based on findings from Kantar.
Kantar’s FMCG panel records the SKU level purchasing of 30,000 demographically representative British households. Shopper behavioural data is transferred to a programmatic platform to provide a target audience based on real purchasing patterns. Cross channel media exposure is mapped back to panellists and campaigns are assessed for shopper response and sales uplift. Through measuring a single shopper’s behaviour before, during and after a campaign the effect of all parts of the marketing mix can be isolated and ROI calculated for specific media elements.
Kantar offer a full suite of solutions covering all elements of the media cycle
Kantar offer a full suite of solutions covering all elements
of the media cycle
