Elevated Ad Tracking with Mental Availability and Mental Advantage Analysis
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity.
On March 12, 2025, quantilope sponsored a session during the Quirk’s Virtual Session – Consumer Reset.
Senior Tracking Lead, Madita Brandhorst, presented the session on ad tracking. She described the analytics a good tracker will track and went through a case study to illustrate the effect.
Watch the recording of the session or read the full transcript below to learn for yourself what good ad tracking looks like.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our presentation, ‘Elevated Ad Tracking with Mental Availability and Mental Advantage Analysis.’
I'm Quirk’s Editor, Joe Rydholm. Thanks for joining us today wherever you are.
Just a quick reminder that you can use the chat tab if you'd like to interact with other attendees during today's discussion. And you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenter and we'll get to as many as we have time for at the end.
Our session today is presented by quantilope. Madita, take it away.
Madita Brandhorst
Thanks so much, Joe.
Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, maybe good evening, depending on where you're tuning in from. And welcome to this presentation.
I'm Madita and I'm the associate director of tracking solutions here at quantilope. I started out in market research more than 10 years ago and I really started with doing brand and ad tracking, back at Ipsos.
Now here at quantilope, I'm focused on developing and continuously improving quantilope’s tracking solutions from both a research perspective, but also working very closely together with our product team and making sure that we have the latest tech available for consumer-focused tracking. But today I want to go a bit back to my basics and talk to you specifically about advertising and ad tracking.
The reason for that is because to be honest, creating great advertising in 2025 is tough. And I'm not sure how many of you are working in advertising or ad research, but I'm sure you can relate that there are a lot of challenges. Basically, more than we ever had to face as creatives, marketeers and insights people.
I know that a lot of you might be facing budget cuts, right? Given the worldwide economic turmoil, the limited growth that we saw in several key markets and even inflation. This means that when it comes to advertising and that tracking, it's more important than ever to really prove the ROI of the work that we're doing.
It's not only that, but there's also tons of new regulations out there. I know we are all thinking about a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. that might or might not come. Then there's tons of other regulations like data privacy laws getting stricter and stricter whether you're in California or Europe or in China.
So, there's also an increased need for really first party data and becoming more independent of third-party data.
And of course, then there's AI, right? What would a webinar be without AI?
And the interesting thing about AI is that it can potentially take over more and more aspects of the creative process, which could be great, but it could also be worse, right? So, I'm sure we've all tried some AI, created ads and they don't always hit the mark.
The rise of AI also means that in the digital sphere, especially when we're thinking about performance marketing and performance advertising effectiveness. We're also facing increased threat of AI basically generating oppressions for us instead of actual human beings.
But I don't want this to be too negative. On the other hand, there's also tons of opportunities that lie ahead in the year 2025 and beyond.
There's a huge amount of new and relevant research on advertising effectiveness. We know more about how to make great advertising than ever before in history. And there's also brilliant new tech and new platforms from Google's Meridian, the new marketing mixed modeling platform that they just launched to new channels that simply didn't exist five to 10 years ago.
And that allows us to interact with consumers in new ways, whether it's Amazon Marketplace or a podcast or a TikTok shop. They all seem so familiar to us, but actually they haven't been around for long. And still there are new tech platforms and channels popping up basically every day that allow us to engage with consumers in new and exciting ways.
Then again, of course there is AI. Like I said, it can speed up processes that used to take days if not weeks, and they can provide new creative ideas super easily even when you're on a budget and facing that pressure.
So, in 2025, marketers and us as researchers, from my perspective, we more than ever need to keep up with these new trends in advertising effectiveness and in advertising in general to really prove the ROI of the work that we're delivering. I'm not sure how you feel, but from my perspective, there's just so much new knowledge out there and a lot of it really challenges what we thought we knew about effective advertising.
I think all of us felt we already learned that TV isn't guaranteeing the high reach that it used to, right? It was a long-term staple in any kind of big budget media plan, but in some cases, out of home advertising like the posters and billboards are now generating more reach, reaching more people than TV is with the landscape becoming more fragmented into streaming and live TV and different players.
This theme of consumer reset that we're now having at Quirk’s it really comes down to media landscape, behavior and usage. But even with the more tech driven things and performance advertising, there's research that now calls into question how reliable AB testing and platforms such as Meta’s Facebook and Instagram really is because the algorithms optimize who they display your ads to based on previous or other people's behavior.
That means that an AB test in Instagram will always be biased in some way because the groups that your ads are being exposed to are already optimized, making it harder for you to really understand which ad is performing better and why.
Then I know that back in the day, we were all afraid of wear out, right? People getting bored of your advertisement and you seeing that decline in your tracking metrics, whether it was aided brand awareness or brand image facet that you wanted to push. Now, what we've recently learned is that we should actually focus on wherein we should aim for consistency.
Findings by the IPA show that the more consistent your creative strategy is, the better it will perform and the more creative it will be. And when it comes to that effectiveness, we also learned that instead of making a choice between performance and brand marketing, you should actually do both for maximum ROI. So, it's really about combining those things.
These findings are really just the tip of the iceberg, right? And I'm sure if you're following the discussions on LinkedIn, there's many more that come up on a daily basis, but I don't want us to panic.
Don't panic because in the next 20 or so minutes I will give us all a little crash course on the most important findings on advertising effectiveness, both the classics as well as new groundbreaking things.
I want to focus on findings that will help us develop, evaluate and track better and first and foremost effective advertising. And as soon as we've got the basics down, which I hope you will all be learning something new, then we'll dig deeper into how we can incorporate that finding on advertising effectiveness in consumer research, specifically in ad tracking. I will provide some inspiration, some do’s, maybe some don’ts on what you should and shouldn't do or what you should definitely include in your next ad tracker.
I will also provide an intro to the concept of mental availability and mental advantage analysis. Which from my perspective is a super exciting new tool that we have to catch messaging effects.
Let's start at the beginning and take a look at some research, we all are researchers here.
Let's really start by taking a look at the foundations, the key drivers that we know make advertising effective. Those things have been proven time and time again. In order to be successful, there's basically “only”, three things that your ad needs to deliver on.
The first thing is reach. Really successfully reaching the intended target audience. Of course, this is easier set than done. This covers media budgets, channel selection and creative cut through power to get people's attention in our low attention economy.
Next thing, there's branding. If your advertising doesn't create memories for your brand, it might just be a waste of money because it's really important that your brand cuts through and is easily recognized in your ad.
And lastly, maybe most interestingly, the messaging. Which messages resonate with a target audience and which messages lead to a behavior change in the short or in the long term. Such as viewing the brand more favorably, connecting a new idea or image facet to the brand, or maybe just buying the brand or buying the brand more often.
You'll notice that I did not touch base on things like brand purpose or brand love here. That's because from my perspective, there simply isn't enough scientific evidence that these concepts, brand purpose for example, or brand love, make ads more effective.
So, I really want to focus on these three key drivers today, reach, branding and messaging. And I want to dig deeper into RBM together with you.
Let's start with three things that you should know about reach.
From my perspective, it's important that we as researchers, know how great advertising works because only then can we be true consultants to our marketing team and support them with not only measuring the effect of ads, but also with that creative process and coming in as guides.
The first thing I want to share with you is the 95:5 rule. It was introduced by John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It states that basically only 5% of potential buyers are in the market at any given time. What does it mean?
Think about all of us on the line here. We are probably shopping for groceries, but at this point in time, we're very much not shopping for groceries. We're in a webinar learning about ad effectiveness. We're not in a supermarket, but that doesn't mean that a retailer such as Target or Walmart should not advertise to us just because we're not currently in one of their stores. It means that for brands, it is important to also focus on the 95% , on average, of people who are not currently buying, who are not currently in a store, who are not currently in front of a shelf. Because if you're getting more ingrained into those people's brains, it will impact future sales.
The learning here is that you should really focus on, let's say sophisticated mass marketing. Focus on the 95%. It's not about hyper-personalization for the 5% that are already showing digital signs of intent to purchase your product, but it's about focusing on those not in the market because they're the much bigger lever for brand growth.
What ties in quite nicely with this is an all-time classic, the 60-40 rule. This term was coined by Les Binet and Peter Field more than 10 years ago.
From my perspective, it's almost a great next step from the 95:5 rule, even though they were introduced in a different order. But this rule states that you should do both brand and performance marketing to reach both current buyers and potential buyers. Therefore, this pretty much reflects, the 95% that are not currently in market that you should also reach them with long-term or longer-term brand advertising.
In fact, what recent research shows is that if your brand is currently focused on performance only, for example, if you're a B2C online focused brand, moving to performance and brand will likely increase the ROI of your marketing efforts by up to 100%. It's about 30% on average, which is huge, especially if we're thinking about budget constraints. So you should really do both brand and performance.
While the ideal ratio according to Binet and Field is 60% brand and 40% performance, the perfect ratio for your brand will honestly depend on brand size, your category and budget. This is really just an inspiration first finding to go deeper because to be honest, there is no silver bullet unfortunately when it comes to media planning and strategy.
While you should focus on high reach activities, it doesn't mean that you should only use traditional channels, just TV or out of home. And when you're doing performance, you shouldn't just do digital channels, but it's really about combining them and being mindful of what your goal is. Because according to the research by Bell and colleagues, depending on what your campaign goal is, you will have a different media strategy that will give you maximum effectiveness.
I think that's clear to all of us researchers. It's not enough to optimize for GRPs. You will need to go deeper to align your goals with your strategy and to invest in different channels that make sense for the goals.
And again, it's about combining those things, right? Combining reaching out to buyers and non-buyers, combining brand and performance and combining more traditional and more digital channels.
Let's move on to three things that you should know about branding.
First of all, branding is a must. I think I don't need to tell the researchers, but I know that there are still some creatives out there who think that consumers hate visible and clear branding, but they don't.
According to science, they actually don't mind it. They don't mind bigger brand logos. It doesn't impact likeability or have any detrimental effects. So please do make your ad look like you and yes, make that logo bigger, if in doubt. It's really the most important hurdle that your advertising needs to take after that initial cut through.
But I also understand the creative perspective. I mean, there's always the saying that you should just show a brand logo for a minute, but of course that would be pretty boring. And there's tons of creative things that you can do to make branding more fun.
One of those things or one concept that you should know is called distinctive brand assets or DBAs. The term was coined by Jenny Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It describes that not only things like the brand's logo, but also colors, shapes, taglines, sounds and even characters can elicit a brand without the brand being there.
I think we all know Tony the Tiger. And which brand do you think of when I say Tony the Tiger? I'm not sure if somebody popped it in the chat, but of course it's Kellogg's. It's Kellogg's Frosted Flakes or Frosties.
That's really the power of distinctive brand assets. Something, a character in this case brings the brand to mind without me even mentioning the brand. The important thing is also that you don't need to be super different. Ingredient wise, Kellogg's Frosties and other cornflakes aren't that different. But Tony the Tiger is unique and really helps to get us thinking about something closer to the shelf where we can also see Tony the Tiger on the packaging.
So, distinctive brand assets can be super helpful and also make things up and make them fun. Tony the Tiger is also a great example for another key aspect of branding, which is consistency.
Tony's been around for more than 70 years. I looked it up for us. He was first introduced in 1952.
Research by System One and the IPA clearly shows that consistency leads to higher creative quality and makes it much easier for consumers to create brand memories. And that process simply needs time.
So, when it comes to branding, do try to resist the urge to change. Stay as consistent as you can. Even if you're not a fan of an asset, try to use it.
Now we'll move on to where the creative magic usually happens, the messaging.
When it comes to messaging, there's one phrase you should from now on hopefully always remember, and that is category entry points.
Category entry points or CEPs describe the needs, occasions or motivations that make people want to buy a product. They're really independent of a brand, very mundane things like being thirsty, which can be an entry point for buying soda or wanting to feel clean, which can be an entry point for body wash.
What your ads should do is they should connect your brand to category entry points, those basic human needs. Because in fact, those category entry points are the building blocks of mental availability. Meaning that if you connect your brand to relevant buying situations, these category entry points, then this helps your brand be more mentally available for consumers.
All of this knowledge around CEPs and mental availability was first introduced by Byron Sharp back in 2010 when it was still called brand salience, but it was then further developed by Jen Romaniuk in how brands grow too and Better Brand Health published in 2023.
And when it comes to featuring these category entry points in an ad, it's really about co-presentation, making sure that your brand is there when people face those basic human things.
Think about Snickers with their ‘You're Not You When You're Hungry’ campaign. It's a very simple human need being hungry and it used humor to connect the brand and the divas to the CEP.
What's important here is that even though Snickers was the hero of the story, it wasn't all presently featured, right? It was just their means to an solution to a category entry point.
Your brand doesn't necessarily need to be the hero. There's no super intricate story needed, but a bit of humor and some category entry points.
Lastly, less is more. The more single-minded, the more obvious your ad is, the better. Because consumers really don't want to work to get your messaging, to get your advertisement and to understand what brand is being advertised.
Make it simple. Use creativity, use humor like Snickers did with their divas and really feature basic human moments of life.
Snickers featured people after football practice, people in a car on a road trip, things that we can all relate to. Then they pulled in Snickers to solve that key need of being hungry. This is also what you should do. Focus on some selected situations, rotate them, but don't mush it all together because that will only make it more complicated for people.
Now, that was a lot of insights and learnings, but I really want to put this into practice with you all and talk about ad tracking. But before we go there, just a quick summary of what we discussed.
First, key learning on reach, the more the better. With the 95:5 rule, only 5% of buyers being in the market right now, you should really focus on the 95%. Shift your budget towards more brand focused marketing, mixing traditional and digital channels, which will give you the biggest lever for brand growth.
Key learning number two, make sure to be you. Stay consistent no matter what others say, including your CMO. Try not to change, of course you can evolve and develop like Tony the Tiger who looks way different than he used to 70 years ago but really try to stay consistent. It'll just make it easier for your edge to cut through and work for your brand.
Thirdly, let CEPs take center stage. Feature the mundane things in life like getting hungry, being on a road trip or being just exhausted after practice. There's usually no need for a super complex, super intricate story, but the focus should be on co-presenting your brand with a relevancy piece.
Now with this knowledge in mind, how can we build an effective ad tracker?
The most important thing is that your tracker should cover metrics that help you assess these three key drivers of advertising effectiveness; reach, branding and messaging.
The first thing for reach is that you track and survey consumers at the right time. We recommend starting data collection around one to two weeks after your initial spending or GRP burst. That's because your campaign does need some time to be remembered and settle in people's minds.
Next, the big question is what you even track if you track consumers, if you track ad impressions, if you simply take a look at the GRPs over time or your media spend. There's loads of different things here.
We at quantilope recommend to always track consumer focused metrics in addition to other metrics simply because there is a difference between having ads on air and people actually remembering your ads.
With our low attention economy, this is where we do differentiate between theoretical and effective reach. But before we go to effective reach, I would always recommend that you cover some classics in your ad tracker like ad awareness unaided and aided to track that basic level of buzz.
It should theoretically correlate with your media investment or your share of voice and share of search. Share of search or SOS is specifically known to correlate with future sales. So, this is really a great metric to help you understand that general media buzz that people are experiencing. It can also help you benchmark yourself against competition, especially if you don't have access to spending data.
The challenge with ad awareness is that it can be influenced by campaigns that may take years. Tony the Tiger that people still have in mind even though they haven't seen an ad for a while. So, what we propose tracking is an additional question, which we call qualified ad awareness that helps you better understand the baseline buzz, whether this actual specific brand and ad memories.
And with this kind of context timeframe, reach and ad awareness, you can then get closer to effective reach, which we usually measure by exposing people to de-branded stimuli. For example, a specific scene from a hero, TVC or a de-branded out-of-home ad.
It can be included in a survey quite simply. And what you then do is you really ask for recognition. Of course, this isn't the perfect measure for each because again, there are many factors between an ad being on air and people actually remembering it. But from my perspective, effective reach really comes close as a proxy for this metric because it does take human memory and coding and human processing and attention into account already.
What's great about including a question like this in your ad tracker is that you can super easily test for branding as well by asking those who remember an ad or at least who think they remember an ad asking them what brand they think the ad was for. Simply asking them favorably in an open-ended way to mention the brand that was being advertised.
Brand linkage will give you a really sharp measure of your branding power, usually much better than any aided awareness would. It also allows you to calculate branded reach, which is the proportion of consumers who remembered an advertisement and also linked it to the correct brand.
This last metric branded reach is super interesting and powerful because it really allows us to split any sample, any consumer sample that you have into two groups, those who remember being exposed to an ad and remember that ad or brand versus those who are unexposed. This gives us all of the options to really do a natural AB test and an experiment in order to then derive the effect of that campaign.
When it comes to deriving the effect of that ad or campaign, we then at quantilope use mental availability and mental advantage analysis. These analytics are based on category entry points that were already mentioned. The key needs that make people buy a product and mental availability combines a number of CEPs into a single metric while mental advantage analysis focuses on individual CEPs and those changes across groups.
If you've never heard of these concepts before today, this is really where quantilope comes in.
Let me give you a quick intro to quantilope. Quantilope offers an end-to-end consumer intelligence platform that automates the whole market research process from briefing to service setup to analysis, insights and actions. And also leverages AI to make that even easier for you as a researcher.
We've recently been awarded the number one most innovative market research platform by Greenbook in their annual GRIT survey.
On the platform we can really run two things. Any ad hoc study that you need with advanced methods such as maximum difference, scaling, implicit reaction, time-based analysis or conjoint. As well as automated longer term tracking technology, including what I just mentioned, mental availability and mental advantage analysis on the platform.
We can really automate any existing tracker, bring it to the platform, including historical data, but we can also elevate and really customize any tracking project that you have.
In addition to this flexibility, we also offer a range of automated tracking solutions that come with a validated service setup, fully automated analysis and an insights dashboard that's ready to go and always gives you live data.
Our flagship solution that I actually developed together with a team of internal subject matter experts in late 2022 beginning of 2023 is called Better Brand Health Tracking Solution or BBHT for short. This automated solution is really inspired by Jenn Romaniuk’s book that you can see here and the research of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. So, anything around the loss of brand growth, mental availability and category entry points is what we base this on and what we've been successfully running for a lot of clients around the globe for two years.
Our next development is a new solution called Better Brand and Ad Effectiveness Tracking, which brings together these kind of brand inspired concepts of category entry points, mental availability and mental advantages with all of the knowledge that I just presented to you on ad effectiveness. What we, I would say, mainly use this solution for is really to understand the messaging aspects of advertising in much more detail.
Again, when it comes to messaging, we are really talking a lot about mental availability here because if you center your messaging around category entry points, which are the building blocks of mental availability, you can actively influence your brand sales success because mental availability statistically correlates with actual sales performance, meaning that if your advertising can move the needle on CP messaging, it'll move the needle on mental availability, which will likely move the needle on sales, which I think is really, really cool.
When it comes to measuring mental availability in a tracking survey, we use the main metric of mental market share, which is calculated across all category entry points that we track and ranges from zero to a hundred. So, you can interpret it very easily, it's just like a sales market share.
Like I said, this metric actually correlates with real world data. Meaning that if you track this and see that your ad moves the needle on mental market share, then it'll actually have an impact on sales, which is pretty cool. From my perspective, this should be one of the new metrics that we use when it comes to developing ads and campaigns.
But there's more than this, there are two important drivers for mental market share. The first being how many people have a brand mentally available at all? Basically, how many brains your brand reaches, which is called mental penetration. The second is how broad your brand's mental network is, which is called network size.
Now what's super cool is that we know how to increase mental penetration or network size. You can basically increase mental penetration by reaching more people with your communication marketing efforts. Again, sophisticated mass marketing for the 95% who are not in market and network size is really driven by different messages that you display.
Again, thinking about Snickers and showing Snickers after sports practice and on a road trip. These metrics really help you to understand messaging effects in a new way, but they can also help you to better understand reach. But when you want to dig into the nitty gritty of it and understand what specific messaging effects on individual CPs, that's where I would recommend you take a look at mental advantage analysis.
It's statistically, I would say somewhat advanced using marginal frequencies in order to control for two factors that influence brand relationships to attributes.
First brand size, bigger brands are always associated with more CPs or more attributes. Think about household stable brands like Dove for body wash. Secondly, CEP Prototypicality with some CPs just being more common than others for a specific category.
So, if we didn't control for these factors in the analysis, big would always win. Small brands would always lose, and it would also be very hard for an ad to increase perception on a facet that is already very strong. But with mental advantage analysis, we automatically calculate expected scores for each brand CP combination. Meaning that once you have your expected score, your mental advantage or disadvantage, you can use that to benchmark your performance over time showing you if a CP was or if an ad was able to increase the CP connection while controlling for all of these other factors. Which means that from my perspective, this can be super helpful to very convincingly and surely identify messaging effects. I think it should be part of your ad tracking toolkit.
This is what it looks like. This is a mental advantage analysis that we did for Dove in the body wash category. This chart is actually quite easy to read because basically everything that is positive is a sign that your brand is doing better than expected on an attribute like for skin to feel soft and to soothe my skin. This is what we call a mental advantage.
Similarly, anything that's on the negative side of things where Dove in this case is performing worse than expected on the aspect of after participating in sports is a mental disadvantage.
And what is great is that in addition to this benchmarking capability, you can really track the effect of your ads over time by just understanding any uplifts in mental availability effects. For example, you can see here that Dove is performing significantly better wave for wave on the attribute ‘for the whole family’ when comparing spring to summer 2024.
That was a quick intro to how we do ad checking here at quantilope and to bring it all to life.
To wrap our session up, I will lastly share a case study that we recently did with a global CPG client for combined brand and ad tracking.
This client wanted to understand the key drivers of effectiveness of their recent ad campaign, and they wanted to go beyond metrics like ad recall or likeability. It was also really important for them to not only understand ad performance, but also the impact on their brand.
What we did was we leveraged our Better Brand Health Tracking and ad effectiveness solution to capture recognition in the terms of effective reach, brand linkage and branded reach for not only their own ad, but also for competitors to provide that up-to-date benchmark.
The tracker itself was quite lean, just below 15 minutes LOI. We really used that branded reach element in order to divide the sample into four groups and then understand mental availability and mental advantage in detail.
Here's what we learned.
First, focusing on reach, we saw that the clients' ads here in green did a great job of cutting through the noise and being remembered by consumers with a fact of reach being up to two X compared to their competitors. Their media investment at a crucial time of year, that much I can say really paid off, but the picture did look a little different when it came to the second important driver of ad effectiveness branding.
You can see that in the brand linkage, the client ads in green are doing good job, right? They're basically on a similar level like competitor B and better than competitor C, but there's still room for growth compared to competitor A.
With this setup where we also evaluated competitor ads, we were able to really dive deeper into competitor A's ad and we understood that color was a super important element that strengthened the brand linkage here. The distinctive brand asset of color in this case is really something that we recommended our client focused on more for their next ad.
Now, what was really interesting was the messaging because overall from these graphs here, you can say that the client did quite a good job on reach media investment, media planning, and also decent job on brand linkage. But when we combine the two to calculate branded reach and then split the sample into four groups, brand buyers without branded reach, brand buyers with branded reach, and the same for non-buyers people with and without branded reach. It got really, really interesting because you can see that as we would expect brand buyers are on a higher level when it comes to mental availability as measured by mental market share than non-buyers.
However, what you can see here is that the ad based on these different groups managed to significantly increase mental market share by 1.3 percentage points among non-buyers. It might not sound like much, but remember that this metric highly correlates with actual sales and growing your sales potentially among a crucial audience that is not yet buying in your brand is super cool. From my perspective, a great measure of success for this ad. And this wasn't all.
We were also able to see that mental penetration, which was basically maxed out among existing buyers, also increased significantly, reaching 10, 13% more non-buyers, right? So really imprinting the brand into new people's minds, which I think is super cool, and again, speaks for the highly effective reach and branding that they used in their ad.
Lastly, we also saw that these ads were able to really spark new messages in people's brains with non-buyers who were exposed to the campaign, had branded reach.
On average connecting two additional relevant buying situations with that brand compared to buyers who didn't and non-buyers who didn't see the ad. And again, you can see here that we are on a very high level with the buyers across the board, but this ad really made a difference for the non-buyers, for the 95% of this brand.
Digging deeper into this case, we saw that this was directly connected, this mental availability increase because of different CPS and key messages. So, you can see here the people being exposed to the ad, having branded reach in darker shades and the people not exposed in lighter shades. Among both existing buyers as well as non-buyers, we really saw those CP connections go through the roof for the three main messages of the ad.
So, with our Better Brand and ad effectiveness tracking, we were able to prove for this client that the ad's high media investment also led to an impressive effective reach, are performing all competitors in a crucial season, that the branding was good, but that they could use distinctive brand assets more, especially color. And that the ad that a significant increase in all mental availability metrics, specifically among non-buyers, a crucial audience for brand growth.
With that, we're at the end of my part of today's session.
I would love to open up the floor for Q&A. And while you can already hit the Q&A box, I'll just give a quick summary of what we covered today.
Basically, two things. We discussed how to create effective ads, which we as researchers should know to support our marketing folks and how to effectively track ads.
So, just a quick rundown when it comes to ad effectiveness, three things reach, focus on sophisticated mass marketing for the 95% branding. Keep it clear, keep it consistent, focus on where in instead of where out. And use distinctive brand assets and messaging. Really use category entry points for your next campaign. We really see incredible impact among the clients that adopt this approach, and I cannot recommend this enough.
When it comes to ad tracking, my wholehearted recommendation is including those key drivers of advertising effectiveness in your tracker. Measure effective reach, measure brand, combine it into branded reach, and then use this metric to split your sample into exposed and unexposed and really drive the impact on relevant messages such as category entry points, for example, by using mental availability and mental advantage analysis.
And with that, I will now look to you.