By Paul McIntyre & Danielle Long
The near guru-status bestowed by many in adland and marketing on the advertising effectiveness work of British author and advisor Peter Field just thrust the emerging science of active and passive consumer attention toward advertising as the next great leap for the global marketing industry.
What you need to know:
- Advertising effectiveness “godfather”, Peter Field, says the emerging Australian work on consumer attention to advertising, not impressions or a brand's share of advertising voice, is “totally electrifying”.
- Field’s comments were made on the Advertising Council of Australia’s webcast last week launching its global benchmark study To ESOV and Beyond.
- The first-of-its-kind research analysed the Ad Council’s Advertising Effectiveness database of campaigns to identify a "clear relationship" between a brand’s consumer mental availability, its extra share of advertising voice (ESOV) versus competitors and key business growth and metrics.
- It is the first time ESOV has been examined with mental availability, which the study defines as "a measure of the breadth and depth of perceptions of a brand".
- Mental availability is not the same as top-of-mind brand awareness. Per the Ad Council report, as brands compete for consumer mindshare and memory, advertising plays a critical role in growing mental availability. Low mental availability, per the study, is typically when a person is aware of a brand but knows nothing about it. Conversely, high mental availability is achieved when a person has both high awareness and knowledge of a brand. The result is an increased likelihood of that brand coming to mind more often during buying occasions
- "As the effect on mental availability increases, so do the business effects," said the study’s co-author Rob Brittain.
- The effect of mental availability on brands was first identified by Prof. Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk in their 2004 work at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia. The peer-reviewed research says brands with high mental availability are more likely to achieve stronger business metrics including sales, market share, profit growth and customer acquisition and retention.
- Per media science researcher and Amplified Intelligence CEO Karen Nelson-Field: “If brands are overspending on low attention platforms and under-spending on high attention platforms, while your competitors are doing the opposite, the principles of share of [advertising] voice will fail.”
- The driving forces of mental availability are budget size, media channel choice and creative strength. However, the dysfunction of the media marketplace is one of a number of threats to ad effectiveness success and Nelson-Field says it is "solely responsible for eroding the true value of ESOV for marketers”.
- The report calls for the use of attention metrics to adjust SOV/SOM analysis. Nelson-Field says new data confirms that attention drives mental availability – both positively and negatively.
- The shift by brands to embrace "share of search" [Google) as a proxy for the share of a brand's advertising voice is misguided, the report says.
Mental as anything
A brand’s share of consumer advertising attention, not the globally accepted principle of advertising share of voice, is a “totally electrifying” development that will shape and entrench advertising effectiveness and its business impact, Peter Field told last week’s webcast from the Advertising Council Australia on its new benchmark ad effectiveness study, To ESOV and Beyond.
To paraphrase Field on last week’s Ad Council briefing, without robust measurement and industry-wide use of attention metrics as a new critical data layer to link consumer mental availability for a brand to business impact, advertising effectiveness advocates are bogged.
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