The best channel choices for successful advertising campaigns

Not all platforms are created equal and advertisers must be mindful of the power of those built for attention, whereas others foster inattention. The result can impact on advertising return of investment.

Marketing expert Robert Brittain is one of the authors of "Attention & Effectiveness: To ESOV & Beyond Part 2".

Digital platforms that allow users to rapidly skip or scroll through content may be a preferred way of consuming information for the time-poor masses, and a gateway to millions of eyeballs, but for ­advertisers they may not hold the same promise.

A new report titled Attention & Effectiveness: To ESOV and Beyond Part II, commissioned by Advertising Council Australia, found that creative strength plays a critical role in advertising and demonstrating effectiveness in delivering business impacts.

But not all platforms are created equal; some are built for attention to advertising, whereas others foster inattention.

This also means that, when it comes to measuring return on investment, one dollar spent on one media impression cannot be considered the same as one dollar spent on another.

The findings come at an inflection point in the industry when boards and business leaders are increasingly scrutinising return on advertising investment in a ­recessionary environment.

The report is authored by pre-eminent marketing effectiveness experts Robert Brittain and UK-based Peter Field, and also commissioned Professor Karen Nelson-Field, who is chief executive and founder of media effectiveness measurement platform Amplified Intelligence. Ms Nelson-Field and her team tested 39 ads from the ACA Effectiveness Database using Amplified Intelligence’s proprietary eye-tracking technology to measure active and passive levels of attention within those ads.

The report examines attention as a proxy for creative strength, and it found that if a piece of advertising is creatively stronger, audiences are more willing to watch it. The report warned, however, metrics were weakened among brands that shifted investment to low attention platforms where the attention paid to advertising is lower.

“You need to invest or think very carefully about how you invest across platforms because they can really kneecap your campaign,” said Mr Brittain. “You can have something that’s creatively very strong, that can go in the wrong direction if you invest in it not in the wrong way, but if you choose to go down a cheaper route, we saw that, particularly with lower budget campaigns or negative ‘extra share of voice’ (ESOV) campaigns, they tended to skew towards lower attention platforms.”

The researchers found, conversely, that if the investment was skewed towards higher attention platforms, the creative outputs worked harder.

“The amount of attention it gets at a campaign level really increases,” Mr Brittain said. “And when that number increases, we see this big increase in terms of the effect it has on the business. So profit grows faster, customer acquisition is quicker, retention is better. ”

The report found that creative strength in advertising can drive profits and growth, but channel selection can amplify or undermine its effectiveness. The research builds upon the groundbreaking report first released in 2021, which showed the relationship between the intensity of advertising investment, brand mental availability and business effects of money spent on advertising placement.

Mental availability is a key signal that determines if brands are going to win with customers when an opportunity arises.

The first report found that brands supported by positive ESOV (those that have a high intensity of advertising investment relative to their size) offered more certainty on the return from advertising. For example, when advertising spend was higher than a brand or business’s share of market, it was able to demonstrate growth.

The new report highlights the role of creative strength, and that when matched with high-attention media platforms the results can be powerful drivers of growth.

A webinar on the new report Attention and Effectiveness: To ESOV and Beyond Part II is available to join on Tuesday 21 March from 5pm.