Can we integrate the creative strength in media optimisation?

DVJ developed a new innovative measure for media contacts to analyse the impact of media channels: The Reality Performance Score. RPS is a new KPI that represents the real number of contacts brands have with consumers. RPS compares each media to another and evaluates them. It weighs each media differently based on the opportunity people have to engage with that medium. RPS looks at the decay effect of advertising memory and integrates the strength of the medium. RPS looks back at the number of contacts from last week and ads a part of that to this week. As a result, RPS is the first real KPI that represents the total sum of all media.

Client’s challenge

All people involved with the media plan know how important the strength of a creative is when planning a campaign. All the hard work of finding the right audience and the best mix can be a waste of time if the creative is not meeting the objectives. Within DVJ Insights, we help advertisers and their agencies to plan better by using a KPI for all media combined (the Reality Performance Score: RPS). Because of the importance of the creative strength we have built in the possibility to correct RPS for creative strength.

The case

The client wanted to know what the relation is between creative testing and in-market effectiveness results. Because the client follows a disciplined process of pre-testing and optimization, it is good to understand if this also impacts in-market performance. The best possible way to analyze this is to integrate creative strength in RPS and see if the correlation with effectiveness KPI’s will improve.

In order to do this meta-analysis, we need data from several resources, namely:

• Pre-testing database: Specifically for the client, DVJ Insights has tested over 30 different campaigns over the past years.
• Tracking Data: The client follows their brand health position and effects of advertising on a weekly basis.
• Media data: On a weekly basis of all media channels. The requested media data is related to costs, GRP’s and reach.

The approach

To understand the full impact of integrating creative strength we first had to create different KPI’s that could predict the total level of contacts. For this we used the following aspects:

• Expenditures: Net expenditures on a weekly basis for all media
• GRP’s and reach for the main channels that the client uses
• RPS: The total value of all contacts measured via the DVJ model
• RPS corrected for creative strength

The creative strength of each ad is measured via the DVJ pre-test and is comparable with the beta factor we use for media. The beta factor for media channels considers the probability of seeing an ad. The basic principle is that the probability of seeing and ad from start to finish is high for cinema or pre-roll ads, but low for in context placement. Therefore, we need to correct each ad for this probability.

The pre-testing methodology of DVJ considers the willingness to watch an ad and is therefore a valid metric to use for correcting RPS.

The way RPS is now constructed is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1

The results

To understand the predicted value of each metric that is used for media we made a comparison between the effect of that metric and the advertising effectiveness metrics (Advertising recall and recognition). The one with the highest correlation is the best KPI to use for planning media.

By conducting this study, we learned that adding the creative element to RPS (RPS+) has a positive effect on the representation of the total number of contacts. The original RPS had already shown a more positive impact on recognition and ad awareness opposed to only using GRP or expenditures. With RPS+, this impact has grown even more as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

With the results of our research we improved the RPS even further. As a brand, you can plan more effectively and look at the minimum and maximum you should spend on media. It proves that a good combination of media effectiveness research and pre-testing will lead to the highest effect of investments and will definitely increase ROI significantly.

Client’s benefit

Optimizing media spending is an important topic. How to plan your investments from week to week while avoiding overspending, but also knowing what the minimum amount of investments are to generate impact. Spending and GRP are not able to plan all media combined. With the development of RPS we have created an opportunity to plan all media combined. By pre-testing ads our clients are able to maximize their effect and plan media even better. Average performing ads need at least 100 GRP’s extra to have the same effects. That is why integrating the creative impact in RPS will make clients even more effective.