Is Your Attribution Tanking And Brand Lift Weak? Creative Is The Issue; You Need To “Brand Early And Often”!
Click here to view a 15-minute video of the key findings.
Click here to download a PDF of the slides.
What to do when media campaign measurement reveals weak website traffic or meager brand lift? Blame the media plan or media vendors? Most often, creative is the issue and your campaign is failing to “brand early and often.”
Key findings:
- Conduct a “brand early and often” creative audit: Watch/listen to all your ads. Check off if your brand is mentioned in first two seconds and if there are at least five or more audio track brand mentions in 30-second ads.
- You can look away but you cannot shut your ears: In video ads, audio branding does all the brand recall heavy lifting.
- Audio case studies reveal implementing the “brand early and often” creative best practice generates stronger purchase intention and increased brand lift and website attribution.
- Do you want your brand association and recall to explode? Use a jingle with melody that says the name of your company.
- Don’t blame the media plan or media vendors for weak attribution and brand lift: Usually creative is the issue and the ad copy fails to “brand early and often.”
The 95/5 rule: The number one job of advertising is to create positive memories
The prestigious Ehrenberg Bass Institute of Marketing Science reveals that only 5% of consumers are in-market at any time for a product or a service. This applies to business-to-business categories as well as consumer advertising.
The remaining 95% are not in market and not thinking about your brand or category. The 95% are definitely not paying attention to your irritating performance marketing or sales event ad.
Your brand must be “easy to mind, easy to find”
Your performance marketing or sales event ad will fail if the audience cannot remember your name. Your ad will really fail if the 95% “not-in-the-market” consumers cannot remember your name.
Advertising creates memories and memories generate sales; Clicks don’t generate sales
Jon Lombardo, former Global Head of Research at LinkedIn’s B2B Institute and the founder of newly launched AI-driven Marketing strategy and measurement firm Evidenza, reports, “One of the primary things people misunderstand is how advertising works. People think they just put an ad in front of you and you immediately buy. That’s not how it works. Generally, you don’t generate any sale from an ad, what you do is generate a memory and then at some point later they consult their memory.”
Conduct a “brand early and often” creative audit: Watch/listen to all your ads; Check off if your brand is mentioned in first two seconds and if there are at least five or more audio track brand mentions in 30-second ads
Conduct a branding audit of all your ads: TikTok, Meta, TV, AM/FM radio, podcasts, social video, connected TV, etc. Create a grid where you mark down if the brand name appears in the first two seconds. Indicate how many brand mentions occurred in the ad. Note down the number of times your visual logo appears in your ads and how often the brand name occurs in the audio track of your video ads.
How did your “brand early and often” creative audit perform? The goal is for all creative executions to have the brand in the first two seconds and at least five mentions in a thirty-second ad.
You can fix weak branding by replacing the word “we” in your ad copy with your brand name. The key to fixing the brand linkage of your ads is to ensure the audio track has lots of brand mentions. Visual logo flashes in video ads have weaker impact.
You can look away, but you cannot shut your ears: Why audio branding does all the brand recall heavy lifting
A major TV study from DVJ Insights found that the more times the brand name was said in the audio track of the TV ad, the greater the brand was linked to the ad. One or two visual logo flashes in the ad have modest brand effect. Increasing visual logo flashes after the first instance shows weak improvement in brand recall.
Video ads with one visual logo appearance versus those with six visual logo appearances only add 8 points of brand recall. Video ads with one audio brand mention compared to those with six audio brand mentions add an astounding 39 points of brand recall!
Why does increased visual branding generate so little lifts in brand recall?
Attentiveness studies reveal that only 40% of TV ad occurrences are seen. Most of the time, TV ads are only heard or play to empty rooms. In video ads, audio branding does all the heavy lifting to drive brand recall.
Hundreds of brand effect studies reveal that the greater the number of brand mentions, the stronger the brand equity
The greater the brand mentions, the greater the brand association
Thousands of brand effect studies find the more you say your brand name, the greater your advertising brand recall. If you say your name a lot, more consumers can recall your ad and correctly tie the ad to your brand.
Want to supercharge association to your brand? Consider sonic assets or a jingle
A new study from System1 and TikTok reveals you can boost brand awareness of your ads with a sonic asset in the first two seconds. Other key awareness drivers are a logo, a brand character, and a jingle.
A major TikTok watch out from System1: If you’re using an influencer or content creator, make sure your brand occurs in the first two seconds. If not, the influencer is recalled, not your brand.
Case study: Insurance firm implements “audio branding do-over” and improves brand recall
An insurance company made strategic changes to their advertising creative that dramatically improved brand effect. Instead of waiting until the :20 second mark as they had in previous ads, the new enhanced creative included a mention of the brand in the first few seconds of the copy.
The insurance company also made a strategic change in the number of times they mentioned their name. In prior ads, the brand was mentioned only once or twice. In the enhanced branding ads, the name was heard more often. Not the recommended five mentions, but an increase nonetheless.
Enhanced branding boosts the emotional impact of the ads
Veritonic, the advertising measurement firm, evaluated the new enhanced branding ads for the insurance firm and the prior poorly branded ads against key emotional factors: happiness, optimism, likeability, and trustworthiness.
The poorly branded ads are in grey below. The ads with enhanced audio branding are in blue.
Across the board and against any measure, Veritonic found the enhanced branding ads performed better than the prior poorly branded creative. Overall, the average score of ads with enhanced branding was +9% greater than the poorly branded ads.
Happiness, optimism, trustworthiness, and likeability all saw growth. Mentioning the brand earlier in the ad and more often helped develop an emotional connection with the listeners.
Purchase intent sees significant growth after exposure to enhanced branding ads
Purchase intent is arguably the most important factor for advertisers. Purchase intent is what influences customers to buy a brand.
Veritonic measures purchase intent twice, before hearing the ad and after the ad is heard. The difference between the two illustrates how effective the audio creative is in impacting intent to buy.
Veritonic found the average difference in purchase lift for the insurance firm from the older poorly branded ads was actually negative. The creative did not positively impact campaign outcome.
By contrast, enhancing the branding grew purchase intent +160%. Not only does enhanced branding matter for emotional outcomes, but it also has a significant positive impact on influencing customer purchase intention.
Case study: Recruitment firm implements “brand early and often” audio creative best practice and website attribution surges
A job recruitment site conducted a “brand early and often” audit. Their 2022 campaigns were poorly branded.
AM/FM radio ads did not contain the brand in the first two seconds, nor were their sufficient brand mentions. In 2023, all of this was fixed. Here is the “brand early and often” creative audit:
Website attribution ranged from poor to modest for AM/FM radio ads lacking “brand early and often”
LeadsRx conducted attribution measurement studies of all of the job recruitment brand’s AM/FM radio national campaigns. All ad occurrences via Media Monitors from all AM/FM radio vendors were studied.
The key finding? Poorly branded ads result in website traffic lift in the small to good range. Not great.
Website attribution performance improved to the good-excellent range with enhanced “brand early and often” creative executions
LeadsRx studies for five campaigns with enhanced audio branding reveal much stronger website attribution. Your brand has to “be known before you’re needed.”
Effie/System1: Poor branding can ruin advertising impact
Effie runs one of the world’s more important marketing effectiveness competitions. The Effie Awards are based on business outcome growth factors such as incremental revenue, profit, market share, new customers, loyalty, and price sensitivity.
Recently, Effie teamed up with System1, the leading creative effectiveness measurement firm, to create a new effectiveness databank based on 1,265 campaigns. The brands consisted of entrants, finalists, and winners of the Effie effectiveness competition.
The diverse group of brands in the study fell into three categories:
- Challenger brands: new firms with minimal market share
- Scale up brands: those who rank below third in market share
- Leading brands: those who are in the top three in market share
The study found weak branding can ruin the brand effects of ad campaigns from smaller and medium brands. The left side of the chart reveals that the number of positive brand effects drops in ads with poor branding among small and medium brands. The average number of positive brand effects for challenger and scale up brands was 70% lower (2.4 versus 3.4) with poorly branded ads.
The right-hand side of the chart reveals that poorly branded ads from category leaders can also have reduced brand effects compared to well branded ads. The average number of positive brand effects for leading brands was 50% lower (2.7 versus 3.2) with poorly branded ads.
Want your brand association and recall explode? Use a jingle with melody that says the name of your company
Famous marketing professor Mark Ritson exclaims, “The king or queen of them all is the jingle. It smashes all the other distinctive assets.”
Veritonic studies reveal two best practices for an effective sonic identify: have melody and say the name of the brand. Veritonic reports that audio logos with the name of the advertiser are 7.5X more likely to be corrected associated with the brand. Sonic logos with melody are twice as likely to be correctly associated with the brand.
The brand that’s remembered is the brand that is bought
The job of advertising to creative positive memories, reports Ty Heath at the B2B Marketing Institute: “The brand that’s remembered is the brand that is bought. The goal is not to create a lead, the goal is create a memory. Lead generation is short term. Memory generation is long term. Win the mind to win the market. Mind share equals market share.”
Key findings:
- Conduct a “brand early and often” creative audit: Watch/listen to all your ads. Check off if your brand is mentioned in first two seconds and if there are at least five or more audio track brand mentions in 30-second ads.
- You can look away but you cannot shut your ears: In video ads, audio branding does all the brand recall heavy lifting.
- Audio case studies reveal implementing the “brand early and often” creative best practice generates stronger purchase intention and increased brand lift and website attribution.
- Do you want your brand association and recall to explode? Use a jingle with melody that says the name of your company.
- Don’t blame the media plan or media vendors for weak attribution and brand lift: Usually creative is the issue and the ad copy fails to “brand early and often.”
Click here to view a 15-minute video of the key findings.
Pierre Bouvard is Chief Insights Officer of the Cumulus Media | Westwood One Audio Active Group®.
Contact the Insights team at CorpMarketing@westwoodone.com.