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Current Digital under the microscope
Communication planning has experienced something of a golden age of late. More and more options for message delivery are available and the industry has structured itself accordingly, with comms planning strategists housed within both the media agency powerhouses and also specialist boutiques. Clients, who control the advertising budgets, benefit from this, but sometimes are also bombarded with dazzling PowerPoint recommendations that are qualitative and subjective and may be outside the comfort zone of the management on the client side.
Pointlogic have released the results of a major research study into the power and focus of a range of digital communication options. The results are intriguing and come at the right time…
Communication planning has experienced something of a golden age of late. More and more options for message delivery are available and the industry has structured itself accordingly, with comms planning strategists housed within both the media agency powerhouses and also specialist boutiques. Clients, who control the advertising budgets, benefit from this, but sometimes are also bombarded with dazzling PowerPoint recommendations that are qualitative and subjective and may be outside the comfort zone of the management on the client side.
In such foggy times people turn to the researchers. Yet this in itself is a minefield. The currency measurements do a great job, but rightly sacrifice comparability for accuracy within their silo. Measures of effectiveness can be incredibly deceptive. It is against this backdrop that the Compose research evolved. It is genuinely neutral and measures the holy trinity of reach, power and cost to enable comparisons across contact points.
We traditionally measure digital delivery alongside its offline brothers and sisters. But such is the current level of interest in all things digital that we recently designed a survey with a 100% focus on digital. We surveyed reach and usage of 59 digital media (which still meant leaving an awful lot outside the survey scope). We wanted to understand what consumers could tell us about the role of different contact points. Not just generic terms such as ‘banner ads’ but, for example, what their perceptions were of the effectiveness of ads on portals vs. ads on the websites of traditional newspapers or magazines.
It was a big survey with over 8,000 US consumers interviewed. The method was online, so of course we only learned about those within the digital universe, which has to be borne in mind when generalising findings. As well as the 59 contact points we also measured the power of the contact points for 16 different communication tasks. These varied from informational tasks such as ‘price’ and ‘quality’ to more funnel-type tasks such as ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’.
So what did we learn? Naturally, many things, but let’s pull out two thoughts to leave you with.
Websites are a clear winner in the research. Taking the example of purchasing decisions, around 60% of adults surveyed flagged websites as being good for deciding what to buy. This was around 20 points ahead of the nearest contact point, price comparison sites. Throughout the research, websites performed in a similar way. Why is this so important? Well, think about how much of the budget is spent on trying to get people to the site rather than improving the quality of the site itself. There are countless tales of expensive banner campaigns that just dump people in mid-site with no logical place to go. The message seems to be to trust consumers to find the site and maximise the experience they have when they get there.
Another interesting finding concerned emails. They are by no means the most powerful contact points but, remembering the need to factor in reach and cost, their story is an interesting one. They have the ‘bandwidth’ to deliver messages in a way that other contact points do not. We focused on opt-in emails and consumers showed they valued them. Of perhaps the most significance is that the reach and assessments of power for emails were actually higher for older consumers. Higher-spending older individuals are a challenge for a brand fully committed to a digital strategy and our findings suggest taking a second look at emails is well worthwhile.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of data points within the results, so apologies for only flagging up two points to start. The survey is accessible as a research database and has also been fused with our full Compose dataset and loaded to our planning tools. We can of course come and present it to you if you prefer a more traditional offline interaction!
Current Digital under the microscope
Digital under the microscope
Communication planning has experienced something of a golden age of late. More and more options for message delivery are available and the industry has structured itself accordingly, with comms planning strategists housed within both the media agency powerhouses and also specialist boutiques. Clients, who control the advertising budgets, benefit from this, but sometimes are also bombarded with dazzling PowerPoint recommendations that are qualitative and subjective and may be outside the comfort zone of the management on the client side.
Pointlogic have released the results of a major research study into the power and focus of a range of digital communication options. The results are intriguing and come at the right time…
Communication planning has experienced something of a golden age of late. More and more options for message delivery are available and the industry has structured itself accordingly, with comms planning strategists housed within both the media agency powerhouses and also specialist boutiques. Clients, who control the advertising budgets, benefit from this, but sometimes are also bombarded with dazzling PowerPoint recommendations that are qualitative and subjective and may be outside the comfort zone of the management on the client side.
In such foggy times people turn to the researchers. Yet this in itself is a minefield. The currency measurements do a great job, but rightly sacrifice comparability for accuracy within their silo. Measures of effectiveness can be incredibly deceptive. It is against this backdrop that the Compose research evolved. It is genuinely neutral and measures the holy trinity of reach, power and cost to enable comparisons across contact points.
We traditionally measure digital delivery alongside its offline brothers and sisters. But such is the current level of interest in all things digital that we recently designed a survey with a 100% focus on digital. We surveyed reach and usage of 59 digital media (which still meant leaving an awful lot outside the survey scope). We wanted to understand what consumers could tell us about the role of different contact points. Not just generic terms such as ‘banner ads’ but, for example, what their perceptions were of the effectiveness of ads on portals vs. ads on the websites of traditional newspapers or magazines.
It was a big survey with over 8,000 US consumers interviewed. The method was online, so of course we only learned about those within the digital universe, which has to be borne in mind when generalising findings. As well as the 59 contact points we also measured the power of the contact points for 16 different communication tasks. These varied from informational tasks such as ‘price’ and ‘quality’ to more funnel-type tasks such as ‘awareness’ and ‘consideration’.
So what did we learn? Naturally, many things, but let’s pull out two thoughts to leave you with.
Websites are a clear winner in the research. Taking the example of purchasing decisions, around 60% of adults surveyed flagged websites as being good for deciding what to buy. This was around 20 points ahead of the nearest contact point, price comparison sites. Throughout the research, websites performed in a similar way. Why is this so important? Well, think about how much of the budget is spent on trying to get people to the site rather than improving the quality of the site itself. There are countless tales of expensive banner campaigns that just dump people in mid-site with no logical place to go. The message seems to be to trust consumers to find the site and maximise the experience they have when they get there.
Another interesting finding concerned emails. They are by no means the most powerful contact points but, remembering the need to factor in reach and cost, their story is an interesting one. They have the ‘bandwidth’ to deliver messages in a way that other contact points do not. We focused on opt-in emails and consumers showed they valued them. Of perhaps the most significance is that the reach and assessments of power for emails were actually higher for older consumers. Higher-spending older individuals are a challenge for a brand fully committed to a digital strategy and our findings suggest taking a second look at emails is well worthwhile.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of data points within the results, so apologies for only flagging up two points to start. The survey is accessible as a research database and has also been fused with our full Compose dataset and loaded to our planning tools. We can of course come and present it to you if you prefer a more traditional offline interaction!