Linear TV is still held up by many on the buy-side as primarily a brand-building tool. That perception can work against it at times, as broadcasters push to attract more performance budgets. But it still definitely sees the benefit, as it’s still common for clients to default to linear TV for their big brand pushes.
New research from Dentsu, released this morning, verifies linear TV’s ability to deliver on brand metrics. But it also suggests that video advertising more widely can be used effectively for brand campaigns, and challenges some commonly held assumptions.
Turning attention to long-term value
The report, The Brand Reset, found that digital video advertising, including short-form formats, is capable of producing multi-year brand-building effects. Dentsu says this challenges the notion that linear TV is the only channel capable of driving long-term growth. Connected TV meanwhile was found to be as effective as linear TV at delivering on brand-building objectives.
Dentsu’s research built on its ‘Attention Economy’ study, and a look at the attention data helps explain digital video advertising’s strength in brand building. While the research shows that attention is important for brand building, the thresholds for effective attention aren’t as high as might be imagined.
The study found that a single video ad exposure has the potential to contribute to long-term brand building, estimating that just one ad exposure can result in an average increase in sales of between 1-5 percent over the following three years. And while greater levels of attention tend to deliver bigger brand effects, this relationship dwindles after the 20-second mark. The longer formats available on TV, therefore, won’t necessarily inherently be more impactful than shorter formats used online — though it’s obviously still the case that 30-second plus formats will in some cases be necessary to deliver the message a brand wants to.
While the report highlights some of the nuances of building brands using using video, the overall thrust of the report is that video is very effective at delivering long-term impact, and that the data which proves that to be the case needs to be taken more seriously when it comes to creating campaigns.
“While marketers intuitively recognise that brand building captures attention and is critical in creating long-term demand, achieving stakeholder buy-in for it has often fallen short and performance-driven investments have felt like a safer bet, too often taking precedence,” said Will Swayne, Dentsu’s global president of media.
Les Binet, an expert on marketing effectiveness who advised on the research, said the data “re-legitimises” long-term brand building in digital video. “It gives planners a coherent way to think about modern video effects and reopens an important industry conversation about long-term value,” he said.
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