Collaborative synergy: How DVJ Insights and VU University Amsterdam empower future marketers through real data and research innovation

Lisette Kruizinga – de Vries

At DVJ Insights we value academic research and therefore also cooperate in various ways with academia. For example, we regularly provide master students or academic researchers with data that they can work with and write their thesis or academic articles about. Hopefully to make more people enthusiastic about this profession.

Starting in February 2024, we cooperated for the third consecutive year with Dennis Herhausen and David de Jong from the VU University Amsterdam on their master’s course on Survey Research Methods. The students learnt about questionnaire design, sampling, data collection, and also how to analyse the obtained data.

On February 7, at the start of the course, Mark van Koolwijk and I gave an introduction to actual marketing research, namely, how we conduct marketing research at DVJ Insights. We explained the ideas behind our pre-testing methodology where natural environments and unforced exposure play a large role. We illustrated this with some real-life examples of poorly and well-performing ads.

The data we shared was data on pre-roll videos that we tested with our pre-test. Students received data from 36,777 respondents who evaluated two ads. In total, we have tested 196 pre-roll videos for six different countries, namely the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Poland. The data contained information on the performance of each of the pre-roll videos on engagement, brand recall, associations and evaluation. It also provides some information on the background of the respondent.

The assignment was that the students had to code the pre-roll videos on different elements, based on academic literature and their own creativity, and examine which elements are critical to ads’ success. This way, the students were able to work with real data and apply techniques learned during the course, such as multiple regression analysis and moderation analysis.

Dennis Herhausens expresses:

“For the students, it is so nice to be able to work with real data; in that way, working with data comes much more to life!”

On March 11, the students pitched their final ideas and findings to three representatives of DVJ Insights, namely Jelle Quak, Mark van Koolwijk and me. Five groups were selected to pitch their ideas, what they had done and found in the analyses, in about 10 minutes to convince us that their idea was the best. We were highly impressed by the high quality and amount of work the students did in this short period. We saw very interesting presentations and creative coding of the ads. Interesting coding they came up with were for example, mystery ads (where the product advertised remains a mystery for some time to generate curiosity) versus up-front ads (where the product is at the centre of the ad), or whether the ad is animated, contains a natural scenery, people dancing or laughing, a jingle, bright versus dark colours. Some of the findings were that up-front ads, in contrast to mystery ads, generate more positive and relevant associations and are more likeable. However, mystery ads keep the attention of the viewer better. Bright colours and people dancing in ads lead to higher enjoyment, message recall, and positive associations. All in all, we gained new insights into what drives the effectiveness of online video ads.

These cooperations are very valuable to us, as we can contribute to academia by providing data and input to students that they can learn from. These students are the next generation of marketing researchers and any opportunity to inspire them with actual marketing research cases can be taken. At the same time, we receive interesting insights into what works and does not for online video ads, coded ads and data, and fresh new ideas on how to code the ads.

Picture 1: Jelle Quak, Mark van Koolwijk, Lisette Kruizinga-de, Dennis Herhausen, David de Jong