Three Oxford University professors have published a study that claims to have cracked the code of how complex combinations of media channels can influence the long-term effect of ad campaigns on consumer attitudes.
Jason Bell, Felipe Thomaz and Andrew Stephen — all from Oxford’s Saïd Business School — analysed over 1,000 large brand campaigns from around the world to create a set of archetypes that describe different media allocation styles.
They then measured the effect of these archetypes on longer-term brand outcomes, like awareness, association and motivation (a proxy for sales that is similar to purchase intent).
Beyond the Pair: Media Archetypes and Complex Channel Synergies in Advertising, is the largest study of media mixes ever undertaken, according to its authors, and the first to look at interactions between more than two media channels.
The number of channels brands use for each campaign has been increasing since 2013, according to the paper, and by 2019 had risen to just over four. But despite the surfeit of measurement tools available to brands, most campaigns are still only optimised for reach.
Thinking only about reach and treating channels as interchangeable means of accumulating impressions is simplistic and neglects other, valuable outcomes, say the researchers.
‘Channels are not perfectly fungible,’ the researchers wrote, ‘and managers should consider the unique individual functionality of channels relative to other available channels, along with the potential for complementarity in the media plan.’
Using their archetypes and the dataset of campaigns, the researchers showed, for example, that combining lots of TV and outdoor advertising with a heavy dose of Facebook and YouTube (Archetype 7) was the most effective strategy for increasing unaided awareness among audiences.
Archetype 4 meanwhile, which was notable for its above average commitment to point-of-sale advertising, tended to work best for improving aided awareness and motivation. And Archetype 3, which used a lot of channels with algorithmic targeting, came out top when measuring increases in association metrics.
Using the right archetype can improve the uplift for specific brand outcomes achieved by a campaign by anywhere between 52% and 750%, according to the study. But these figures can mask a lot of variation, warn the researchers.
Archetype 4 may have been the best strategy overall for boosting aided awareness, for example, but individual campaign data showed that it’s a high-risk strategy that can either pay big returns or leave brands with nothing to show for their media spend.
Which archetype was best for which brand outcome also changed when the researchers broke the results down by product category. For example, Archetype 6 — which mixes a heavy reliance on legacy channels with lots of Facebook advertising — was the most effective for all of the brand outcomes for CPGs, but for none in the other categories.
No single archetype or strategy emerged as dominant in the study, meaning there is no ‘silver bullet’ for media planning, say the researchers, but some archetypes were dominated by the others. Archetype 2, for example, which combines TV with online video and display, never performed the best against any outcome. Archetype 2 was also the most popular media allocation style, accounting for 23% of the campaigns in the dataset.
The Beyond The Pair study was published in the Journal of Marketing earlier this month. It is an updated version of a paper published on the Social Science Research Network in 2022.
Thomaz, one of the authors of the study, told MediaCat, that he is now conducting research to determine why different media channels have their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to changing consumer attitudes.
Featured image: Cody Board / Unsplash
