network:
Making your media money work harder
by Bob Nash,
‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’. So said the American advertising pioneer John Wanamaker nearly a century ago – and today a modern version of this problem is causing today’s marketers bigger problems than ever.
The trouble is this: as we all develop ever-more complicated multi media campaigns, it becomes exceptionally difficult to assess exactly which elements have the biggest effect on the campaign as a whole.
WPN working with Mike Colling and Co. recently took on precisely this challenge for client The Salvation Army. It resulted in a significant improvement in the way we can plan major campaigns to optimise the media budget and generate the maximum responses.
The process started with detailed analysis, looking at three year’s worth of results across TV, radio, online, warm DM, cold DM, door drops, press and inserts. Univariate analysis was applied to understand the key drivers of response to each channel. It’s also important to look at the ‘lagged correlation’ – that is, the effect spend today has on response tomorrow or in the following days.
Some fascinating insights started to appear. For instance, although TV has the greatest impact on the overall effectiveness of the campaign, radio was found to have a very significant effect on TV response. Press, Inserts, Online, Cold Reminder DM and Warm Reminder DM were also found to have a positive influence on TV Response – an increase in any of these resulted in an increase in TV Response.
Online response, was quite different; whilst online spend had the biggest immediate effect on online reponse, the influence of spend on other media was far greater than on TV. Press, TV and radio all had a greater influence on overall online response than online spend did.
As a result of this analysis we were able to build two marketing models using multivariate analysis to forecast donation volume by day...for varying levels of media investment...and allocated in varying proportions across different weeks.
Obviously, the results cannot be discussed in detail. However, we can reveal that the Christmas 2010 campaign went on to become The Salvation Army’s most successful ever.
Bob Nash is creative director, Watson Phillips Norman
Posted by: |