BlogDagmar 16.04.2024

How do you ensure the effectiveness of advertising?

What is impactful advertising? What weight do different factors have on the effectiveness of advertising? How can impact be assessed already at the planning stage? Our strategist Hanna Halmela outlined answers to the most common questions about impactful advertising.

What is impactful advertising?

The effectiveness of advertising proceeds through three stages:

Advertising that attracts attention.
In order for advertising to have an effect, it must be noticed. Even if creative content seems great on the drawing board, it is of no use if the advertising message flies by in everyday life. The attention value of advertising can be measured, for example, with campaign measurement.
Advertising that activates.
Effective advertising creates the desired emotional state or action in the target group. The ability of advertising to activate can be measured, for example, by campaign measurement or website traffic.
Advertising that increases sales in the short or long term.
Advertising and all marketing are investments that you want to increase sales – directly or in the long run. An exception, for example, is social advertising, the main objective of which may be related to, for example, a change in attitude. The impact of advertising on sales can be measured as actual sales or predicted with sales modelling.

What is the significance of different factors for the effectiveness of advertising?

Nielsen’s study is an excellent illustration of the weight of different factors.

Content is clearly the most important, with an impact of almost 50%. The better the content, the better the results – and the less important other factors are.

According to Nielsen’s research, price, availability and especially brand size affect the overall picture by 15%. A strong brand also enhances the influence of content.

Reach is naturally important, as only the people reached can be influenced. The most important thing is to reach a large enough audience to get the desired result.

Reach goes hand in hand with targeting. New restrictions on the use of cookies make targeting more difficult, which means that more and more content is demanded. For this reason, it is particularly important to ensure that advertising reaches the desired target group, i.e. that media choices are based on the target group’s use of media.

The closer to the moment of purchase (recency) advertising is encountered, the more effective it works. For example, advertising beer on a Friday triples weekend sales compared to advertising at the beginning of the week.

According to Nielsen’s research, context is the least important, but it is strongly linked to creative implementation. Context could have the potential for much greater impact if creative content is designed to better integrate with the media environment.

All of the above factors influence each other and, at best, cumulate a strong synergistic effect.

Arresting content + impressive channel combination

Many studies support multichannel and prove that a combination of multiple channels produces better results.

Multichannel should be considered from the perspective of the entire customer journey, i.e. every touchpoint, including your own channels, should be taken into account. Different touchpoints should enrich both each other and the customer experience. In all channels, it is important to speak the same language, i.e. use the same visuals and main message, but taking into account channel-specific recommendations.

From channel-specific key figures to measuring the big picture

Traditional media indicators are not enough to verify the impact of the planned entity. They measure each channel individually or from only one perspective.

In our anniversary year, we decided to take up this challenge. For 50 years, we at Dagmar have been united by a passion for more impactful marketing. From the very beginning, our vision has been to open-mindedly renew the industry and enhance the effectiveness of marketing communications.

We want to continue to lay a solid foundation for making the best advertising in the world here in Finland. So we combined our huge (Finnish) databank with the strong expertise of our designers and developed the Advertising Impact Index for the entire Finnish industry. A completely new key figure serving multichannel media planning.