Dive Brief:
- Nielsen Catalina Solutions studied online video ads for Kellogg brands and found that likeability was the metric with the biggest positive impact on sales, per a report in Ad Age.
- The research found that video ads that reached the Media Rating Council's standard for viewability, which is 50% of pixels in view for at least two seconds, correlate to a lift in sales while time spent watching video ads had a bigger impact as ads viewed up to 16 seconds resulted in a stronger correlation with sales. But the winning metric was “likeability,” which had the strongest impact on sales of all three measurement units, indexing at 172 where 100 is average.
- The research covered 15 different elements that might impact sales, and surprisingly two factors with the least impact included reaching an intended target audience and frequency of ad impressions.
Dive Insight:
For marketers, if the Nielsen study’s results are replicable the news should be seen as a positive because the best results came from an aspect of the ad marketers can control — the creative messaging — rather than elements out of their control like how long someone watched the ad or how much of the ad was on screen for a couple of seconds.
The results of the study come at an interesting time for digital ad measurement. Online video measurement has been fraught with issues including last year's scandal around Facebook’s misrepresenting video views on its platform. More recently, P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard sparked an ongoing conversation around digital ad metrics, specifically calling out viewability, after publicly declaring the CPG giant would drop any ad platforms that didn’t get MRC accreditation by the end of the year, effectively putting Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and others on notice.
"There's a bit of a crisis of confidence in digital advertising right now," NCS Chief Revenue Officer Andrew Feigenson told Ad Age. "I believe the way to get past that is through transparent metrics."
