GfK NOP Media

Cross media advertising: how to measure this Holy Grail

Coca-Cola and GfK NOP Media share their success in measuring cross-media advertising.

Brand marketers are under pressure to develop new and innovative ways to advertise and sell products – and, crucially, to prove their commercial success. Simple you say? Not really. New marketing ideas need to find the correct vehicle to use and, as more and more media vehicles become available, choosing the most efficient becomes harder. Coupled with the increasing media knowledge of consumers, this is becoming more and more like searching for the Holy Grail.

So what do you do?

Do you restrict your advertising planning and implementation to those media you can measure effectively now?
Do you accept the fact that the true extent of your marketing activity can never be fully measured and understood?

And what about Sales? People advertise; but is it to build a brand or to sell products? Simply put, it’s both. But which of the media are achieving the best return on investment? And wouldn’t it be great to understand how different media work together?

Coca-Cola Germany recently asked GfK NOP Media to answer those very questions.

The plan was to understand all the benefits of the new darling of the marketing world – the integrated cross-media advertising campaign. People believe that a cross-media campaign has an undisputed effect on consumer perception of the brands using it - however, the effect on actual buying behaviour and, ultimately, sales has not been measureable. At least, not up until now.

GfK NOP Media and Coca-Cola have succeeded in analysing these effects and the interplay of all components for the first time. The results prove that cross-media campaigns have a greater effect on sales than single-media campaigns, and that internet advertising, in particular, has a direct impact on purchasing decisions.

The starting point of the survey was the Coca-Cola Christmas campaign, which featured in November and December last year, using TV, cinema and radio spots, posters, print ads, internet banners, video ads and Google space.

GfK NOP Media used their Web Efficiency Panel to examine the reception of these adverts and the actual purchasing behaviour of consumers. The technology that powers this panel enables the GfK team to track each page visited, each commercial message seen, and each search result presented to the respondents. This is unlike any other software available in the market at the moment, and the system logs all exposures to online marketing, including the type, position and size of activity.

On top of this, the unique feature of this project was that the full internet usage of 15,000 people was integrated with all their purchases of daily essentials and the use of traditional media like TV, radio and print in their households, all collated in one source for direct analysis.

The results of the survey clearly proved that the interplay of the various media significantly strengthened the resulting sales. For the Coca-Cola Christmas campaign, the interplay of TV advertising and the YouTube video ads proved to be the most effective on sales, with consumers who saw the advert both on TV and on YouTube within the same week, demonstrating a 97 per cent higher purchase rate.

In the analysis of individual channels, the video ads on YouTube were shown to be as effective for sales as traditional TV spots, but with the added advantage that internet advertising generates the exclusive reach that is not possible through TV advertising. When we focused on the target age group of 14 to 39, the effects of individual media channels proved to be even greater.

The GfK Web Efficiency Panel (WEP) enabled Coca-Cola Germany to fully monitor their cross-media activity, recording how the individual media categories interlock and affect short term sales. This provides new opportunities to manage and plan campaigns holistically.