Lift Off: Brand Research in the Cross-Platform Age

While the industry has undoubtedly made significant strides in these areas (and will likely continue to do so), one area that has been overlooked until recently is brand research. Central to any successful product, service or ad campaign, branding is critical – if not the most critical – piece of the marketing puzzle. Branding communicates the personality and identity of a product, ensuring that the value to a consumer is communicated effectively and entices them to make a purchase.

As the media industry continues its increasingly aggressive pivot to cross-platform measurement, brand research shouldn’t be left out in the cold. So, what’s standing in the way?

To start, solutions available to marketers have historically lacked the fluidity and scale that is required to efficiently stitch together disparate datasets and identify optimal media mixes.

• Siloed, standalone measurement efforts are still widely accepted, and marketers are often resigned to manually (and ineffectively) stitch together disparate sources of non-normalized data.
• The general lack of insight into platform synergies, coupled with delays in performance insights, have hamstrung the ability to use the data to improve outcomes in real-time.
• Linear TV’s role in optimal media mixes continues to elude planners – despite its recurring prominence in plans, it remains one of the most historically challenging mediums to measure.

As a trusted measurement partner within the advertising ecosystem, we frequently find ourselves discussing these challenges with our brand and agency clients. And so recently, we introduced new cross-platform capabilities into our brand measurement suite. More specifically, we’ve integrated connected TV data from our partners at Inscape to unlock scalable, more efficient brand measurement. Here’s how it works:

The speed at which these results are delivered – coupled with true cross-platform measurement – increases the utility of the data significantly and unlocks previously hidden insights into campaign performance.

Using our enhanced cross-platform solution to track daily performance on-the-fly and make the necessary adjustments in-flight to ensure KPIs are met by the end of the campaign has facilitated a profound change in our clients’ ability to assess the performance of their campaigns in real-time and make changes that can dramatically impact return on ad spend.

To illustrate the potential learnings, we recently partnered with a leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand who wanted to measure the performance of their national cross-platform campaigns against key branding measures – like awareness, recall, and intent. Although the brand is no stranger to brand lift studies, their previous efforts have been siloed, platform-specific and delivered post-campaign (when it’s often too late to correct course).

The brand tapped Comscore and Inscape to measure cross-platform performance across multiple campaigns – and we delivered results daily throughout campaign flights. What we found has profound implications not just for our client, but for brand measurement and advertising.

Sample findings include:

While these specific datapoints are significant on their own, they (more broadly) reveal just how advantageous cross-platform campaigns and brand measurement can be. With this type of insight and data utility, brands and agencies can unlock insights into the most effective sequence of adverting exposures to drive a specific outcome, like purchase consideration. Further, with the multitude of data points now available in near real-time, brands have more flexibility than ever to find easy points of optimization that can drive increased return on ad spend, while a campaign is still in flight.

As we continue to move forward as an industry, cross-platform reach measurement will gain more widespread adoption. Agencies and brands must take a more cohesive, platform-agnostic approach to campaign effectiveness measurement – and brand lift studies should remain a key piece of that puzzle. After all, branding is a key component of any successful marketing campaign, and thus it should be measured like one.

To learn more about Comscore’s brand lift measurement, please contact us here.

Be sure to check out our recent interview at IAB NewFronts, where we discussed this research in detail!