'Reporter's' Notebook: ARF Conference, Day Two
- by Tony Jarvis , April 17, 2019
JERSEY CITY, NJ -- The second day of the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) annual two-day Audience X Science Conference here began with the empirically based “Rules of Marketing Effectiveness in a Digital Era,” presented by Les Binet from the U.K. office of adam&eveDDB.
Binet and his colleague Peter Field have …
Because this is all based on aggregated analysis, the IPA series of reports misses certain truths and fails to address challenges to the findings. First of all to say that high performance does not result in long term benefit misses the fact that the majority of consumers now discover brands for the first time while shopping. It defies the concept of trial and repeat models, the cornerstone of new product forecasting. How does the IPA analysis reconcile to that? Secondly, brand vs. performance effects is largely a consumer segmentation issue. From aggregated data, there is no insight into this fundamental dynamic and therefore the theory has severe holes. Consider autos. If 5% are actively shopping at any point in time, performance effects come from this 5% (very little impulse). Brand effects come from the other 95% (because they are 95%...and because mass media and how we measure brand perceptions via trackers is gen pop.) And how do we know the half-life of brand building when those shoppers DO come into the market say 5 years later...technology has changed by then and anyone would do research. I would need to see longitudinal evidence from the same consumers. Finally, the IPA results do not tie back (or even attempt to tie back) to key industry findings...Erwin Ephron's theory of recency which is based on reminding and my white paper work with Viant and NCS called the Persuadables where we found some segments repeatedly returned 16 TIMES the ROAS...that is an awful lot of effect to not address in the IPA work.
Final point...there is a lot of 60/40 kinds of recommendations in these papers which sounds like directional guidance not optimization. In the age of MTA, we need to do better than that. an alternative way to think about performance vs. brand advertising is offered here http://blog.joelrubinson.net/2019/04/framework-for-managing-brand-vs-performance-advertising/