Not all video is equal: visibility and screen coverage drive sales impact
When it comes to building campaign reach, it may seem as if all video platforms are equal but treating them as such could compromising campaign effectiveness.
To understand why, first, we need to look at how video advertising works.
Professor Karen Nelson-Field
To do this, we enlisted the help of leading academic Professor Karen Nelson-Field, a professor of media innovation at The University of Adelaide. Over the past three years, professor Nelson-Field has conducted The Benchmark Series, an independent, large-scale in-home study that explores how Australians engage with advertising across different platforms and devices.
When it comes to video advertising, the Benchmark research delivered several key findings that will change the way you think about video advertising.
The first is that attention varies greatly from one platform to another. While 58% of people in the Benchmark study actively viewed advertising they saw on television, only 31% did the same for YouTube. Active viewing was even lower for Facebook at just 4%.
And attention matters, with the Benchmark study finding attention is intrinsically linked to sales. Benchmark measured the Short-Term Advertising Strength (or STAS) for ads on TV, YouTube and Facebook and found that television advertising delivers a dramatically different result to the other two platforms, no matter what device it is viewed on.
TV on TV generates a STAS of 144 while TV on PC scores 153 and the TV on mobile STAS is 161. By comparison, Facebook on PC has a STAS of just 118 while the Facebook on mobile STAS is 121. For YouTube, we’re looking at STAS scores of 116 on PC and 137 on mobile.
That’s a lot of numbers to take in so let’s simplify: if you’re looking for effective video advertising channels, TV is the clear winner whether it’s viewed on the big screen in the living room or the little screen in your hand.
To understand why there is such a difference between the three platforms we need to delve a little deeper, but essentially it boils down to screen coverage. An ad that covers 100% of screen real estate is going to be more effective than a video you scroll past or see in a corner of the screen, out the corner of your eye. And it makes sense, right? While ads on TV fill the screen, ads on Facebook claim only 10% of the available real estate while YouTube is slightly better at 30%. Still, neither of the social video channels are a patch on TV which offers 100% visibility, 100% of the time. And the Benchmark research confirms this finding; ads that fill the screen entirely generate twice the sales impact of ads that only cover half of it.
But attention is only the beginning. Attention in the first instance, builds better memory and delivers campaign success over a longer time. You may be surprised to learn that the platform used to view an ad is a significant factor in an ad’s memorability.
Memory matters and if we have one common objective in our industry, it’s to ensure ads stay in the memory of consumers for as long as possible. Granted, great creative generates an emotional response, but Benchmark shows that even a low emotion ad will gain more attention on a highly visible platform and out-perform an emotional ad that can barely be seen.
Good media enables brands to be remembered longer and the Benchmark research found that the drop-off rate of those memories, known as decay, varies greatly by platform. It turns out that video ads viewed on Facebook decay 2.5 times faster than ads seen on TV while YouTube decays three times faster. The difference between platforms is massive, especially when you consider that 28 days after someone has seen an ad on TV, their memory of it will have declined to a rate the same as when they first saw the ad on YouTube or Facebook.
If you’re thinking you can get around this issue by upping the frequency of a YouTube or Facebook campaign, think again. The Benchmark research found the greater the frequency, the more it’s a case of diminishing returns. Hitting the same people with more impressions is just a big waste of money.
As you can see, not all video is created equal. See. The difference.
CONTENT SPONSORED BY ThinkTV
