Setting up even a short-term, one-off online campaign will deliver more facts and figures than you ever thought you needed, from viewing data and click-through-rates to page landings, which can be translated into sales, revenue and ROI.
Offline media is often discounted in favour of online channels that can deliver these take-away figures and provide more immediate evidence of short-term results. According to Newsworks, this is partly because we haven’t seen a large scale survey into the brand impacts and ROI delivered by newsbrands. Until now.
Earlier this month we attended the newspaper trading body’s first Effectiveness Summit. We listened to findings from research which reiterated the strength of traditional media and acknowledged the long-term importance of news brands for advertisers. In the past year there’s been an increased focus on effectiveness studies, with new editions appearing to be published every week. So what did the conference tell us, and is this effectiveness study really different from all the others before it?
The first study –Benchmarking for Newsworks–looked at 500 econometric models across the media industry and suggested that advertising with a news brand could increase campaign ROI three times over. It went on to show that using news brands as part of an advertising campaign can boost overall campaign effectiveness, with TV effectiveness doubling and online display effectiveness quadrupling as part of the channel mix.
The summit also presented the IPA’s Databank study investigating the effectiveness of news brands in the modern media environment. The results showed that a physical and online presence within news platforms is crucial to ensure long-term campaign effectiveness. News brands were the most effective for acquiring new consumers and increasing market share –factors that are key to marketers and brands to achieve long-term business objectives.
Effectiveness has long been a key factor in the analysis of media campaigns and, with the data available, advertisers are now arguably more results-focused than ever before. Short term metrics and immediate responses are the easiest to access, and web traffic and sales volume help indicate short-term uplift. Like many other ATL channels, measurement of print has always been more challenging.
Newsworks’ research joins the increasing bank of available resources for measuring results from ATL channels, such as out of home’s tracking survey Route. Despite an increase in resources for accountability in these channels, this is only the first step in proving both the short and long-term value of non-digital channels.
That an Effectiveness Summit was held demonstrates the increasing focus on and dedication to measurability and accountability from offline media channels across the industry. We’re looking forward to the introduction of even more tools that will allow us to measure offline campaigns to the same extent we can track online campaigns, even in real-time.
