Apples and Oranges of ROI?
by asi
Better ROI From YouTube Video Than Super Bowl Spot.
Are these two means of marketing comms comparable?
How do you compare ROI for traditional media(apples) and new media (oranges)? How do you compare ROI on airing TV ad (that cost you $3.5 million) to 100 million passive, largely uninterested viewers (its actually 75 million – the rest went to the loo or to grab another six pack) to 1.7 views on YT that cost you nothing and generated huge buzz and WOM?
Well currently you cannot really. The metrics of traditional media like reach and recall and brand awareness are all very problematic anyway without comparing them to any new-media comms tool, and marketing 2.0 is still at its infancy, so its partly common sense and mostly the way in which you believe different types of marketing communications work.
I think that while its true that you cannot compare the reach of Super-Bowl ad to 1.7 million views on YT, its the level of engagement with the marketing message that is matters here. Richard Huntington said the other day: "All I am interested in is brand engagement and creative
persuasion and I don’t give a damn whether this is analogue,
digital or live". (Hear! Hear!)
We have more than one piece of research to show that people are tired of TV advertising when it is aired on TV but are quite happy to engage with the same content in their own time, when it was sent to them the viral way through friends - not by way of interruption but by way of invitation.
The most important issue is the ability to reach people when
they are willing to engage with the message. Both TV ads
and YouTube videos are interruptive. One interrupts in the middle of a game or favourite show (bad!) and the other interrupts in the middle of work (good! or if not you have the choice to engage with it whenever you want to). Now when will you prefer to be interrupted? and by who?
So while Super-Bowl spot has a potential reach of couple of hundred of
millions, It is stuck between other ads and its on the perfect time for
me to go and relieve myself or get another beer while a link from a friend or a recommendation
from a trusted blogger has much better chances to get my attention and trust and to generate the E factor.
Another very important factor is the PR and talkability of your message. The YT spot and its viral effect was something to talk about. In the past two weeks it has garnered segments on ABC’s "The View," "Ellen," CNN, "Entertainment Tonight" and even Fox’s "Geraldo." It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad.
So perhaps now its becoming a bit easier to compare the apples to the oranges?
This quote is taken from a completely different context yet I think it neatly applied to the new era of marketing communications:
UPDATE (different angle on the story in a great post from Uri @ Marketing Babylon)
Love the way you look at it Asi. I work in media and its something that we get asked all the time.
But we know that they fear the answer. Its hard to continue to look for an answer to a question when as you put it. They arent getting paid to do that. The research industry has been built just like the rest of us on what I call the formularised package. You get a bit of millward brown brand health tracking. Some Nielsen sales and thats that. How does Nike look at runlondon or the website they created for joga.com that is a continous creation for the community involved.
It doesnt quite fit into the current formularised research report that we have all sat through for hours and clients live and breath by.
I have tried to start looking at time spent with a brand. Comparing the data reports from websites/ web communities / interactive ads or content (TV, Online etc) with more qual based elements like time at events / product usage etc.
It will be an interesting start to have on a brief that states. ‘I want to increase time spent with the brand by 15%’
Mike,
very interesting point. formularised package – loved that. we all live in our own formularised pakages until it doesn’t work any more so we have to change the formula and this is what happenning right now to marketing communications.
I think it was the CEO of JWT that recently said that “time is the new currency” and he is damn right but in order for a brand to get the time and attention of people (consumers), it will have to give VALUE in return.
Oh but I wish we could understand the relative value of TV and You Tube. As a media agnostic I don’t care too much where the work I create for clients appears (the method of distribution) but I do think that we need to be able to compare apples and oranges in order to allow new means of distribution to be a central part of the strategy rather than as a nice add on. Take Bravia paint – 2m production budget but a traditional media budget that cannot have been much more than this. The bulk of active viewings must have been online. This must have been a consideration otherwise you would never have been able to justify the production budget in the first place.
The other reason we need to start quantifying this is i think performance related pay should be hooked into online viewings of ads (media that is ‘free’ to thte client). That ad A gets 11m viewings on the telly is down to the client’s media budget but if Ad B get 1.7m viewings online it is down to the skill of the ads creators.
hey asi
Funny you say that about change. Found a good article on Fast Company talking about change in technology and what drives it. Check out
http://thingsdonotchangewechange.blogspot.com/
Richard – thanks for stopping by, its a great honour.
We increasingly realise that the old dichotomy of media and creative idea is loosing its grip. It will take some time before we will learn the relative value of TV and YouTube because the latter is kicking in and the former is not going anywhere.
While both the Bravia and the Dove cases are purely anecdotal, there are great learning from both. it seems that the evolution video works best on YT, with the viewer 20″ from the screen – I don’t think it would have had such an impact on TV.
Also, both are great examples to the emerging (yet old as advertising)idea that PR-ability of your message should be a clear objective – an indication of cultural impact. Talkability potential of your strategy and creative should be integral to every campaign architecture.
It’s nice to find familiar faces in the blogosphere..
Coming to the topic of your post. I see a great asymmetry of perceived trust between old media and new media. At the moment, a tip from another blogger is considered more trustworthy than a tv ad.
But Ad companies are invading the blogosphere with merc bloggers that will ‘recommend’ products of their clients. At one point, trust will dissipate also in the blogosphere and you might end up closing your circle of influentials.
At the end, it sounds so similar to the old debate about mass media’s influence. Better your neighbour’s word or the tv ad?
Giuseppe,
what a nice surprise. I see that you are very up to date with the issues at stake…
thanks for joining the conversation
A.
Great point all around Asi. And I like your end quote. A lot of truth to it.
On that note, since my salary depends on creating experiences, while I agree with the immense power of amazing clips like the Dove spot (great example of word of mouth/ROI), I also caution the Ad industry that the so called “viral video” alone will not save us.
We must also create useful experiences that provide value.
Just look at how powerful both You Tube and Dove combined are.
Advertsing must strive to break barriers with both messages and experiences.