• by Masha Geller , July 2, 2003

The latest Dynamic Logic newsletter highlights some of the findings from the company's analysis of its AdIndex tool, and it looks like advertisers should think twice about trying to do more with less.

Dynamic Logic says that some advertisers have recently begun to use a single advertisement to promote multiple brands and the results are not very encouraging.

Dynamic Logic looked into 27 campaigns that prominently featured multiple brands in advertising and found that these campaigns on average under-performed and were generally scoring below MarketNorms for most of the metrics. Dynamic Logic found that co-branded campaigns perform below the single brand MarketNorms average. This was true in all brand metrics with the exception of Brand Awareness, where it is about equal, according to the data.

On average, Dynamic Logic concluded, "the co-branded campaign executions are not making the brands featured more top-of-mind, not making the message more aligned with the brand, not making audiences more favorable towards the brand, and not making respondents more likely to purchase the brand advertised, in fact, it hurts it."

What's a marketer to do? "There is a limited amount of time in which a person has the opportunity to be influenced by an advertisement," the report states. "Advertisers should make the most of each impression and not try to combine two brands in one ad. If you are considering co-branded ads, be sure that:

The message works across both brands

Each brand has its own moment of clarity

The message is simple and easy to absorb

At least one brand is ALREADY well established with the target audience.