What’s in a name? Creating successful advertising

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Advertising, depending on who you speak to, can be seen as an art or a science. On the one hand, it is intended to stir emotions, draw in consumers and maintain a loyal fanbase. On the other, there is the need to generate repeated sales, encourage unconscious purchasing decisions and appeal to behavioural traits.

One recent study, led by researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in Australia, sought to examine how advertising could be made more effective, and the factors affecting its likelihood of success. The resulting paper, Finding creative drivers of advertising effectiveness with modern data analysis, makes several suggestions for improving advertising effectiveness and the means by which researchers analyse campaigns.

The research set out to address two issues with previous studies of advertising effectiveness, the first being the way that the relationships between creative variables and various advertising outcomes had been determined – often using ordinary least squares or logistic regression models. The models assume that the ‘effect of explanatory variables is independent of the effect of other variables’, according to the paper.

The second issue is that most studies on advertising effectiveness lack replication of analysis, as ‘they apply a single analytical method and do not use a hold-out or alternative data set for validation’. This means that an alternative methodology or algorithm could lead to the results of an experiment not being replicated, according to the authors.

To address this, the research team applied a modern data analysis paradigm to a data set originally reported by Hartnett, Kennedy et al ( 2016 ) that examined creative variables from 312 television advertisements against their short-term sales using an ordinal logistic regression model. The data for the 2016 study was provided by a consumer packaged goods company, and the adverts were aired and measured in five developed markets for more than 60 brands. The advertisements were accompanied by a commercially validated measure of sales effectiveness using single-source data.

In the 2023 research, researchers re-analysed the same ads using traditional, artificial intelligence and machine-learning models, to identify which creative variables contributed the most to sales performance.

John Williams, director of the Bachelor of entrepreneurship at the University of Otago and one of the report authors, says it was important to use a variety of methods in the research. “Every statistical method, model or algorithm has pros and cons, and assumptions that are often not met in practice and where the impact of those assumptions being violated are rarely known and difficult or impossible to quantify. If we use several methods equally and they all give the same results, then we have more confidence that our results are an artefact of the data and not the method.”

The research made several findings – firstly, that advertising must strike a balance between branding and creative elements. Creative tactics, such as humour or character-driven narrative, are important for drawing attention to advertising; however, executing branding effectively is necessary to help ads build useful memory associations and increase likelihood of a successful purchase.

Early product introduction was linked to improved sales, according to the research, as was later brand name introduction. The study found that it is possible to show the actual product and its use without the brand name overtly present.

“The most surprising finding was not to lead with the brand name,” says Williams. “This, according to my colleagues who are experts in advertising effectiveness, runs counter to accepted wisdom.”

The research found that shorter branding duration positively affects sales, adding that it complements a later introduction of a brand name. The later introduction meant there was less chance of overexposing a brand’s name in a campaign.

The study also found that time spent showing the brand does not always compensate for how the brand is integrated as part of the creative narrative, or how brand name recognition is more important for brands that lack awareness and familiarity.

“If you see an ad for a product that leads with the brand – and if the ad is for a brand you don’t use – you will probably cease paying attention, because you think it’s not relevant to you; you already have a solution to that problem,” explains Williams.

“If the ad is for a brand that you do use, you will probably cease paying attention because you are already ‘sold’ on that brand. Why watch an ad telling you to do something you do already?

“In contrast, if you see an ad and you don’t know what brand it’s for, your pre-emptive cognitive filters will not engage. You will keep paying attention, perhaps even experiencing a sense of mystery and unresolved tension, until you find out what the ad is about. Then, when it is revealed, that release of tension produces a tiny trickle of dopamine.

“Even though the tension-and-release process is subconscious, the trickle of dopamine is real, so you will build a positive association with the ad – and, by association, the product.”

The implication of this research for advertisers is that they can probably generate new insights by applying multiple models to their advertising data, increasing the breadth of creative variables at their disposal to improve creative effectiveness. Marketers should open a discussion with their advertising agencies about these creative variables, which present greater odds for success, and for how the product and brand are incorporated.

What is the biggest lesson from this research for market research businesses focusing on advertising effectiveness? Where possible, do advertising testing with a commercially relevant dependent variable: sales success, as opposed to liking or recalling an advertisement, according to Williams, who adds: “It’s easy for the typical data scientist working in an ad agency to apply our paradigm. A few years ago, it would be tedious manual work; with modern software, that manual work can be automated away.”

l Finding creative drivers of advertising effectiveness with modern data analysis, John Williams, Nicole Hartnett and Giang Trinh, International Journal of Market Research 2023, Vol. 65( 4 ) 423–447, was awarded Silver Medal for best paper published by the IJMR, at the MRS Excellence Awards 2023.

This article first featured in the October 2023 issue of Impact.