New research to reveal the “horrific” cost of dull media

A groundbreaking research study aims to put a physical cost on the wastage of dull advertising on low-attention media.

Dr Karen Nelson-Field is the founder and chief executive of Amplified Intelligence.

The “horrific” waste of money that is spent advertising on “dull” media will be revealed later this year in the findings of a breakthrough new study on marketing effective­ness.

The research aims to put a tangible figure on the amount of advertising investment that is wasted on dull or low-attention media channels.

It will form the next stage of an ongoing research project called The Cost of Dull, which is being led by advertising effectiveness expert Peter Field.

The research coincides with a prolonged slump in the news media advertising sector, which is putting enormous pressure on the bottom lines of Australian media companies.

The study already has revealed that dull advertising is less engaging and memorable and therefore less effective in producing business impacts or results.

Working with brand consultancy eatbigfish, the research used British marketing trade body the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s database of advertising effectiveness case studies to determine that dull or bland creative requires about $19m more investment a year to achieve the business impacts of the industry’s more effective campaigns.

When the research was applied to the US market using data from global advertising research agency System1, the cost of dull advertising increased to $US100m ($148.23m) a year.

The next stage will be undertaken by research pioneer and attention metrics expert Karen Nelson-Field and her company Amplified Intelligence in a bid to put a figure on the amount advertisers are wasting on dull media.

Mr Field told The Growth Agenda, “The explosion of dull marketing is in many ways driven by an obsession with simplistic metrics, especially those that focus on cost without reliably measuring the value created.

“Nowhere is this more true than in the digital metrics that marketing has obsessed with.

“Dr Nelson-Field has shown us that advertising impressions (was the ad served to me) are a very poor measure of outcomes (did it improve my likelihood of buying) because so many digital impressions are so brief.

“An entire media-buying philosophy has been built on the bogus metric of cost per impression, ignoring the dismal value of many of those impressions.

“Nelson-Field’s work on atten­tion levels, for the first time, gives us a way of putting a reliable value to various media impressions.

“In this way we will be able to estimate the penalty cost of choosing low-attention ‘dull’ media versus high-attention media in terms of the lost growth.

“We anticipate that it will reveal an horrific waste of money in marketing on a par with the awesome cost of choosing dull creative,” Mr Field said.

Dr Nelson-Field said the research would seek to determine “whether it’s dull from a low-attention perspective or from a misrepresentation of reach perspective and attention, and then what’s the negative synergy effect on brands.

“That will help crystallise the core problem that we are trying to solve for the industry, which is data quality and transparency.

“Then on top of that you have this double whammy that brands are trying to do their best to simplify but that is also compounding the error.”

The aim is to attribute a “physical cost” to dull advertising as the industry increasingly prioritises return on investment and seeks out greater metrics and effective data.

“This will help the industry make it tangible versus saying ‘attention matters to your bottom line’,” Dr Nelson-Field said.

“This is about wastage and when you put a physical hard cost on it, it’s harder to ignore.”

The latest study by Dr Nelson-Field and Mr Field builds on their previous collaborations.

That includeds the trailblazing research study with marketing consultant Rob Brittain on “extra share of voice”, which was conducted in association with the Advertising Council of Australia.