Posts tagged brand
Measuring the most valuable brands (the easy way)
May 3rd
Last week Millward Brown released the results of their BrandZ top 100 most valuable global brands list. The brand research geek in me is truly fascinated by brand equity research and ever since Millward Brown started releasing this data I’ve been following along. I have to commend them on all of the work they put into the research, it sure sounds like a pretty cool model but there’s this part of me wonders if this is too complicated. To test my theory I figured I’d try and replicate the top line results in my own biased way.
The commonly held belief is that the difference in assets and market cap is what’s accounted for by the brand. Understandably this is overstating things considerably since there are complicating factors. The one, and probably most important complicating factor is that it doesn’t take consumer opinion into consideration. One may argue that consumer opinion is built into the market cap through consumer transactions translating to revenue, but I feel that there are brands out there that are seen as bell weathers whether you buy the product or not. So for my model I included consumer opinion. In fact my experience has been that when you ask consumers a direct question you can be pretty confident that they’ll give you a straight answer. So with that in mind I assumed that if I just asked consumers what brands are the best they’ll give me the right answers. My goal with this project was to keep things simple, that means I wanted to see if I could replicate the topline results that Millward Brown had gotten from their BrandZ study but with a lot less work. I was looking to end up with the following ranking : Google, Microsoft, Coca Cola, IBM, McDonalds, Apple, ChinaMobile, GE, Vodafone, Marlboro.
Aggregate score calculation
As you can see from the example above Google comes up with an aggregate score of 7.5. Think of this as a weighted result that suggests that 7.5 of the 10 people thought Google was a valuable brand. Completing this exercise across all of the brands I had my consumer opinion data which I called aggregate consumer opinion. Looking at the ranking of aggregate consumer opinion scores for each of the brands I realized that my consumer survey was okay. The reality is the folks I talked to had no idea how to rate Vodafone or ChinaMobile. Not that I blame them, both companies branding efforts are directed overseas and not to the US. For the purposes of this analysis I decided to drop them from the results and try to replicate to ranking without those two brands. Now a second look at the US only ranking and viola! success.
US Ranking
In retrospect I should have just asked the question unaided, that may have made a better experiment, but alas this blog is a hobby and no one’s paying me to do this so my effort ends there. Regardless of the veracity of my results I think the point I was trying to make still stands: despite the fact that us researchers like to get all complicated with methodology we often don’t give the population much credit. They have an opinion and often it reflects the same thing our fancy model will tell us, we just need to ask. The thing is researchers are doing what they do because they get a kick out of data, and trying out new approaches to analyzing data is mana from heaven. It’s really the same in many jobs out there, ask a surgeon and he’ll tell you he loves doing new procedures way more than the same boring stuff over and over again.
The reality is that the BrandZ study goes way beyond ranking of brands and provides a pretty cool scoring system for quantifying brand value (something I ignored). I can imagine it also serves as an excellent normative database for benchmarking brand value for clients. I guess what I’m saying it I think the research is pretty cool, but as is the case with all research that’s been summed up to a data nugget, I find it none too exciting to see a ranking of the top 10 global brands. As it turns out if I wanted that ranking I could have asked my friends.
Measurement Options: Wooing brand advertisers…
Apr 30th
Photo: Laineys Repertoire http://www.flickr.com/photos/76283671@N00
Measurement is a chicken and egg argument. Some will argue that unmeasured media has no value (usually the media company) others will argue measurement should follow innovation (the measurement companies). I’ve spoken about this subject before and I still believe what I said to be true: measurement companies are a rightfully risk adverse crowd, and companies looking to open new doors need to create their own measures of success. That means for publishers to move more brand dollars online they not only need to revise creative formats, focus on brand buying solutions, but they also need to develop new measures of success.
As an industry everyone’s wanted more brand marketer dollars even as far back as 1999 when the IAB did a press release titled “Abolish Clickthrough Now!” thinking that the metric didn’t help the cause with brand marketers. The idea of clickthrough as “the” metric for measuring performance took off early and to this day remains an accepted form of ad measurement. As you would expect brand advertisers didn’t see any value in clickthrough – why would P&G care if someone clicked on a Pantene ad? On the other hand direct marketers, those looking for the immediate satisfaction of a click loved it. As such we see the top categories advertising online (according to Nielsen) being the more conversion oriented folks in financial services (think credit card applications), retail, travel, and telecom. Right at the bottom of the list are the consumer packaged goods advertisers, automakers, and pharmaceutical companies – practically the inverse of spend on TV.
Okay, I’ll admit we’ve seen an evolution in the click-through metric to encompass: actions, performance, conversions and view-through, but come on people, it’s all an evolution of the same direct marketing measure. What the industry needs are brand metrics. Hard direct marketing style numbers than can be used to gauge brand success. Well that could be tough. As I pointed in the last post, the data that you’d want to base those metrics on are not available online. So what have we done to measure the effectiveness of online media for brand marketers? Well we’ve defaulted to what they already know, brand awareness studies. Now in full disclosure, brand awareness studies are my heritage. I got my start in Internet research in 1997 at Millward Brown where we tested the first Java ad, the first Flash ad, the first sponsorship, Unicast, etc. We were the only game in town and had plenty of demand for proof that brand marketing works online. We delivered stacks of reports that proved people see and are aware (at least subconsciously) of online brand advertising. We used strict experimental design methodologies, and had extremely convincing data. Everyone was happy. Or were they? It’s been over ten year since I left Millward Brown and we’ve see the online brand awareness research market grow considerably and the number of studies probably now amount to over 10,000. Yet here I sit at my computer eying the dollar spend of brand marketers online and wondering where are the big numbers? They obviously didn’t believe the studies or we would have seen more than the slow trickle of growth from brand advertisers, there should have been an inflection point in the growth rate of brand dollars – but it doesn’t exist.
It’s hard to pin all of the blame on ad formats, and buying options, those are simply impediments. Most if not all brand marketers have dabbled online, but none have come back with their checkbook. It appears they weren’t thrilled with what they saw, and that’s the rub. One could argue that the blame falls on the research companies and there may be some truth to that. Brand awareness research has a reputation of always returning great results, of course they have typically been underwritten by publishers or agencies who are not necessarily the most unbiased bunch. Let’s not forget to mention the way researchers presented the data made the numbers look entirely suspect. Results like “1239% increase in purchase intent” just don’t seem believable and are a pure manipulation of the data for better optics. But even if those negatives adversely impacted a clients view of the data it’s hard to argue with the aggregate data that shows brand marketing works online, right? Wrong. I mean yes of course the aggregate results looked good but the reality was even though the studies were designed to breed a level of familiarity to TV brand awareness studies, the methodologies were incompatible. As a result marketers had an out with online advertising: I don’t trust the publisher who funded the study, I think the numbers as portrayed are unrealistic and I have no idea how this compares to TV. If there’s one lesson to be learned from this exercise it’s not to give marketers measurement that claims to be the same as what they use in other media but is fundamentally different. Had online publishers opted for a more familiar measurement standard, say continuous tracking, then maybe they would have seen the benefit, then again I’m not sure online advertising would have looked all that good next to TV. The other option to take, and the more attractive option in my opinion, is to offer the measurement that was the promise of the internet. To provide a clickthrough type measurement for brand marketers.
There has been some success along those lines. Perhaps the best example comes from Yahoo! and their Consumer Direct product. Designed in conjunction with Nielsen, it allows consumer packaged goods advertisers to buy their specific target within the Yahoo! audience (e.g. diet cola drinkers) and measure the sales lift by using Nielsen data to monitor product purchases in grocery stores. It’s some of the coolest measurement I’ve seen but suffers from a couple challenges: it’s expensive and so it only works for large campaigns (no one wants to spend half their media budget on measurement), it relies on panels (small campaigns are hard to measure), and it’s doesn’t scale well (lots of manual labor). This is the closest we’ve come to offering compelling, data rich measurement of online ad performance. If only the measurement were automated, available for multiple industries, and as ubiquitous as the clickthrough, well, then we’re talking business.
The key takeaway here is that the measurement innovation came not from research companies but from the publisher looking to woo brand marketers. It’s the reality of how the market operates and more collaborations between sellers and researchers could lead to more online brand advertising. I also feel strongly that replicating offline measures online was an exercise designed to fail. It’s downright near impossible to control for all the differences between how media is consumed and brand marketers (like consumers) expect more from the internet. It’s now up to us to deliver.
Media Buying Options: Wooing brand advertisers…
Apr 29th
Photo: charlesstarrett http://www.flickr.com/photos/starrett
Let’s face reality. Online publishers bellyache about getting more dollars from traditional brand advertisers but they don’t really think about or work toward solutions to meet their needs. Publishers have been chasing the easy dollars and become totally rich doing so. When there’s so much money in the easy stuff why should we expect them to work harder, it’s a reality we have to face. Publishers despite wanting all media dollars, have ignored brand marketing in favor of direct marketing. They’re using Henry Ford’s famous pitch, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”
Let’s spend some time on the reality of the solutions that are available in the market. A lot of what’s out there is direct marketing oriented. I’m fortunate that in my day job I get to speak to all kinds of Internet companies that are pushing the envelope on digital marketing. There’s some really cool technology out there to pull every dollar from the available media. But disappointment is inevitable; toward the end of the pitch, I ask my question: “This is great, but what can you offer brand marketers like P&G”. Usually the response is the sound of crickets, either that or some babble about half hearted tweaks that really don’t provide a solution. Over the course of these conversations I can’t help but think online media companies don’t think about brand marketers.
Why would that be the case? Well in retrospect it makes total sense. Online media companies are really just data manipulating machines. They’re engines of creation, they take data, the atomic unit of the internet, and smith it into marketing gold. The problem is it’s damn near impossible to find data online that brand marketers could see as directly relevant to their business. Take an industry that online advertising excels in – financial services. It’s easy to see how at the lowest levels there’s plenty of data to mine. The most basic application would be to run 30 ads for a new credit card and monitoring the card applications to weed yourself down to only those creatives that are generating the highest conversion rates – these days this is elementary work. Try to do the same thing for shampoo? Yeah – not possible.
So what does this mean? Well for one thing, there’s no easy product a publisher can put in front of a brand marketer that is salient. Yes I can hear people crying foul – arguing that TV doesn’t provide anywhere near to the interaction or data that online does, but face it; the promise of the internet display advertising is in the manipulation of the data that drives better results. Without the data to make online sing (and I mean sing like it does for financial services) and with bad creative format to choose from, I can see why as a brand marketer I’d take TV any day of the week.
I have to admit I don’t see an easy solution to this challenge. And challenge it is. There’s a reason why the companies I speak to have lame solutions for brand marketers. Figuring out where to find great brand marketing data online is not an exercise in finding the data but one in creating data. Until someone finds a way to create more brand marketing data online, or we see brand purchases migrating online (not in my lifetime) then we’re at a standstill.
What do you think?
Real Estate: Wooing brand advertisers…
Apr 23rd
TV.com has brand ad formats done right
There have been two major efforts led by the IAB to develop ad size standards, the first effort took place way back in 1996 where the ubiquitous 468×60 and 6 other units were born. Then again in Feb 2001 the IAB released another set of guidelines which introduced 7 more units that included rectangles and skyscrapers. Finally in Dec 2002 the Universal Ad Package was introduced which brought the 728×90 into the fold. At that point standard building moved away from sizes and more toward issues with rich media and streaming video guidelines.
As a brand marketer you crave the visual experiences, after all, you’re communicating feeling, emotion and utility all at once; something that requires a sizable canvas. Doing that in one of the standard units leaves much to be desired compared to TV or even print.
Then there’s the oft quoted issue of ‘banner blindness’, a phenomenon that’s been proven through sophisticated technologies like eye-tracking. The Internet even makes it easy for viewers to ignore ad units. Page template standardization puts aside specific page real estate for advertising. The more I use a site, the more I know that there are certain areas of a page that I need to ignore. The fact that media sites have seemed to roughly standardize on one of two similar templates (banner on top, banner on right margin) makes it easier to take your banner ignoring skill from site to site.
To put this into perspective pick up a newspaper. Yes you can still ignore the advertising, but even if you read that newspaper on a weekly basis the location of the ads in relation to the articles is constantly changing. This is in sharp contrast to web page templating which relies on a standard approach to maximize usability, navigation and content delivery efficiency.
The ads that always catch me off guard are the ads that do one of two things, they either maximize real estate on the page, or they integrate with the content on the page. I would find it hard to ignore a 800×400 pixel ad at the top of an article I was reading. I’d hate what it did to my experience with a site, but it’s the only hope for display brand advertisers.
The real question is do online publishers really care about brand advertisers? That’s up for debate and the topic of my next post.
See the original entry.
See the other entries here
Wooing brand advertisers online
Apr 22nd
Photo by: estoril (http://www.flickr.com/photos/estoril)
I have my opinions on why brand advertisers aren’t shifting online and in my mind they come down to several key issues: ad unit effectiveness & site design, media buying options, and media reporting options. Over the next couple days I’ll elaborate on each of these issues and I might even throw in my opinion on what can be done to turn things around.
I’d love to hear your thoughts.