Energy company uses brand-to-media consonance assessments to optimize ad effectiveness

Seeking a good fit

Editor’s note: Robert Passikoff is president of Brand Keys, Inc., a New York research firm. Allen Gerber is general manager of corporate advertising and brand at KeySpan Energy, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based energy services firm.

Nearly a century ago department store magnate John Wanamaker said “I know half my advertising budget is wasted - I just don’t know which half.” The way ad dollars are invested today it’s still true: half our ad dollars (maybe more in the 24/7, Internet-driven, 21st century) are wasted. But why?

Marketers still buy media based on what a gigantic media services company has identified as providing as much reach and frequency as they can afford, in a media vehicle that’s pretty much ideal for “their” demographic. They pay for it, run the ad, and that’s pretty much it.

But what do marketers really get? Sure, they get the time or space paid for - which presumably delivered some audience determined by the reach and frequency. But they get no proof - not even a certifiable likelihood - that anyone actually saw or heard or read their message. No guarantee the televiewer didn’t zap the commercial. No promise that readers didn’t skip over their ad page. No warranty that the audience that did see it will remember it. Or think well of the advertised brand - let alone buy it! Nothing to let marketers know that they connected with their consumer or that their advertising had any real market effect. You’d think that 100 years after Wanamaker’s lament there must be more to it...some way to assure marketers that they aren’t wasting their money.

Why are connecting with consumers, optimizing media selection and delivering advertising effectiveness more complex and prone to error than ever before? Inarguably,

• Media habits are changing. Where and how to find target audiences has gotten extraordinarily complex. Consumers are no longer glued to three television networks (although some marketers buy media as if they still are). Fewer than half of Americans subscribe to newspapers. And where once there was a dominant sports magazine, there are well over 100 - subdivided by special interests. People now spend 10 percent of their time online. You get the idea.
• The lines are increasingly blurred between consumer demographic and lifestyle profiles. The list of “acceptable” media options gets longer and longer every day, making it increasingly less clear where the highest quality target audiences for the brand are lurking.
• More TV and cable network options means that more and more, the consumer has the power to self-select the ad message he or she will be exposed to. Or zap! Or just plain ignore.
• Further, shrinking ad budgets mean companies don’t have as many media dollars to allocate as they had in years gone by. Mistakes are more costly than they used to be.
• To a media vehicle, an ad is an ad is an ad. They make no special provisions for how your brand is perceived. Yet media choices can have enormous impact on brand attributes.

Your company has invested countless dollars in developing and supporting your “brand.” Wouldn’t you feel better about how you were spending your money if there were some way to insert your brand’s values into the media planning process? To take you beyond standard “reach and frequency” thinking?

It’s not that the concept of inserting the brand into the media plan hasn’t been talked about before. It’s been examined on a qualitative basis, but until recently has not been validated on a quantitative, statistically generalizable basis. Media planners haven’t had the ability to meaningfully introduce real brand values into the planning process, so they do what they know best. But planning by reach and frequency alone is flawed, because the brand’s values and the media vehicle’s values may not be consonant — even when the editorial environment and reach and frequency numbers look right.

It is obvious that your brands will perform better in media environments that are clearly in sync with your products and/or services. For example, OTC drugs are often placed on TV news since news consumers tend to be older. But how can media planners find the fine line between, say, NBC Nightly News, 60 Minutes, and CNN? On one side of the line your key brand attributes are being well received, on the other side they may not be. As we said before, mistakes can be costly.

By inserting brand values into the media planning process, marketers can better assure they connect with — and communicate core brand values to — consumers. Aligning brand values with the values of the individual media vehicle or cable network on which you plan to advertise lets planners predict increased levels of brand awareness and positive brand imagery, before you spend your money. You connect better with your target audience and maximize your brand’s ad effectiveness. You get more cost-effective and strategic media planning — before you spend your money!

The theoretical framework

At the 7th annual ARF Copy Research Workshop in 1990, the Advertising Research Foundation published the results of its seminal Copy Validity Project. This research indicated that the methodological framework of “brand liking” or “brand bonding” was the metric most highly correlated to sales. This is the same framework used by our firms to determine brand-to-media consonance (B2MC). It is successful at predicting higher levels of attention to advertising and predicting increased levels of positive imagery for the brand.

Recent research affirms that this methodology can be profitably extended to the complex process of media selection. It proves that brand-to-media consonance can be measured to identify the degree to which your brand’s values are enhanced by the very act of its appearance in a particular media vehicle. It proves that viewers think better of your brand in a “high” consonance vehicle than in just another “acceptable-by-traditional-standards” option.

It is axiomatic that by selecting media where consumers pay more attention to your advertising, you connect better with them. And nobody can deny that selecting media so that your target audience thinks better of your brand, is, at the very least, related to increased advertising effectiveness.

Calculating brand-to-media consonance

In partnership with KeySpan Energy, a research program was implemented to determine:

• The degree to which a cable channel on which a commercial for KeySpan might appear would either enhance or hurt KeySpan’s overall brand equity score, i.e., how it measures up to the consumers’ expectations; and
• The commercial’s subsequent performance via a traditional advertising test on measures of both category-aided advertising awareness as well as direct image ratings of KeySpan on eight product imagery statements.

KeySpan had previously conducted a B2MC validity test having to do with specific TV shows and now wanted to extend the assessments to include cable networks. This research was conducted to determine the effects each of 11 cable networks had on KeySpan’s ad awareness scores and on target audience ratings of the brand.

Telephone interviews were conducted with 500 members of KeySpan’s primary target audience (residential and commercial decision-makers) within KeySpan’s New York service area. Each respondent was asked to rate:

• KeySpan on eight image statements;
• the KeySpan brand as a stand-alone entity (i.e., not in the context of any particular media vehicle);
• the Ideal energy provider; and
• the KeySpan brand within the context of each of 11 cable networks: BET; News TV 12 (Cablevision); CNN; The Discovery Channel; ESPN; FX Network; The History Channel; Lifetime; The Sci Fi Channel; TNT; WLNY TV 55.

Based upon the Brand Keys algorithm and the top four drivers of brand loyalty for the energy provider category, these assessments indicated:

• KeySpan’s overall brand equity index independent of any specific TV media context was 116.
• KeySpan’s overall brand equity score (an average of the eight image statements and independent of any specific TV show or cable network) was calculated to be 4.88.
• KeySpan’s brand equity scores - if advertised on each of the 11 cable networks. Positive enhancement of the KeySpan brand values would be indicated by a score of 121 or more. Detraction from those brand values would be indicated by an equity score of 111 or less. In this case, the B2MC scores were found to be:

As the general industry practice views cable networks as “electronic magazines,” initial B2MC assessments were gathered solely on the basis of the name of the cable network, e.g., TNT or Sci Fi or ESPN.

However, in order to determine precise brand-to-media effects, in a second phase of the research, a current 30-second TV commercial for KeySpan was inserted into two programs appearing on each cable network. To maintain a truly “competitive” frame, shows were selected on the basis of a single day of the week (Thursday) and two time-slots (10:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.)². The shows included:

A standard captive audience, clutter-exposure test was conducted to measure ad awareness and KeySpan brand perceptions after exposure to the program in which the KeySpan ad appeared. The same KeySpan TV commercial, “Fireplace,” was inserted into all 22 programs, 14-16 minutes into each show. For analysis purposes cable network awareness and brand imagery evaluations were obtained by averaging the two shows’ effects together.

Cable network brand-to-media consonance effects

Table 1 shows the brand-to-media consonance scores for each of the cable networks collected in Phase 1 telephone interviews and the KeySpan ad awareness and attribute rating scores produced by advertising on that particular cable program in Phase 2.

As shown in Figure 1, there is a remarkable correlation between the brand-to-media consonance scores and the category-aided advertising awareness it received in the test.

There was also a notable correlation between the brand equity scores that KeySpan received and the mean brand attribute ratings it received in response to the cable shows.

Implications of the brand-to-media consonance model

It is universally acknowledged that more is riding on every media decision than at any time in memory. It seems as though the industry has been talking about the importance of brand forever. Given the immense investments made “in the brand,” isn’t it about time that marketers insist that the brand - and its very own values - be made a significant part of the media planning process? Beyond demographics, reach and frequency? The time has come to be proactive.

And the industry knows we need something better. How much longer can we rely upon “sliced and diced” reader/viewer/listener profiles? More recent tools based upon the category and brand-purchase behavior of individuals exposed to specific media options have been investigated, but, unhappily, they look suspiciously like a re-shuffling of data-mined, previously-identified segments. These newer systems are an improvement over the approaches of decades past. But they do not actually insert the brand - and the values that define the brand - into the media selection process.

They do not address the important issue of to what degree, and in what specific ways, the very act of being exposed to a commercial within a particular media vehicle enhances or detracts from brand values. Or the degree to which the target audience will actually pay attention to the advertisement. Or what the target audience will believe or feel about the brand in question. In short, they neither improve an advertiser’s opportunity to connect with their consumers, nor do they increase the effectiveness of their efforts.

Current research reveals that appropriately configured, brand-to-media consonance metrics can be a valuable complement to the more traditional media planning tools. Optimized results can be accomplished without sacrificing traditional skill sets that leverage reach and frequency, or demographic and lifestyle audience characteristics.

The obvious...and an insight

In the most recent research, the single deviation from the norm appears in the assessment of WLNY. Assessed as a cable network, WLNY engendered a relatively low B2MC score. Assessments of the individual shows, on the other hand, provided relatively high KeySpan awareness and imagery scores.

Individual TV shows work nearly as hard as the brands themselves to establish values that (they hope) will become emblematic among the viewing public. For that reason, the B2MC assessment allows us to more clearly understand the degree to which individual shows’ values either enhance or detract from the advertised brands’ values.

But media is not always purchased on the basis of individual shows. On the basis of our findings, it is clear that cable networks may not have defined their own values clearly enough for the viewing public. Apparently some cable networks have neither found ways to characterize the “values” they seek to represent nor have they successfully or meaningfully conveyed these values to the viewer. For cable networks, relying upon the halo effect of specific shows is a risky strategy because - as we all know - there are only so many Oprahs, Dr. Phils and SportsCenters available.

Additional diagnostics

The brand-to-media consonance model also identifies which of the top four drivers of brand loyalty are the most-highly influenced by the media option. With this information for each of the media alternatives being considered - be it print or Internet, network TV or cable - it is actually possible to select media for an ad campaign on the basis of which option better reinforces the brand’s values inherent in the specific copy strategy objective(s).

Empirical proof, practical applications

KeySpan and Brand Keys, Inc. have demonstrated conclusively that the effect of a particular media option - in this case, cable networks - on a brand can extend to the level of the commercials’ effectiveness and the brand’s ability to connect with the chosen target audience. These are inarguably the factors that are the very raison d’être for the advertising exercise: increase the likelihood a consumer will be aware of a brand, will actually pay attention to the advertising for that brand, and will come away with a markedly favorable impression of the brand being advertised.

These assessments could also be used by the individual media “brands” themselves, not only to provide better guidance for potential advertisers, but also to provide added value in situations, whether or not the CPMs for the alternatives are equal. It is not unheard of - even in our current economy - for clients to actually pay more when they are able to see demonstrable results.

But whatever the organization applying this technique, the brand-to-media consonance model proves that media planners can now be armed with a new metric that can result in superior media plans for their brands, and attendant increased levels of connectivity and effectiveness for their clients. And they can now do it before they spend their money!

1 These B2MC assessments represent the Total Audience evaluation. BET had been selected as a cable option to reach an African-American target audience. Breaking out African-American evaluations revealed a B2MC assessment of 117.

2 The only exception to this was WLNY Channel 55, where two specific programs had been scheduled. These were Oprah and Dr. Phil.

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