What is the impact of social media advertisements?

Every day we are confronted with an unprecedented number of advertisements. But to generate impact, advertisements must be seen, and thus break through the clutter. In recent years, social media has taken an increasingly bigger piece of the pie when it comes to marketing budgets. But do video ads on social media find their way to consumers? And what makes it so fundamentally different from, say, traditional commercials on TV?

INCREASING MARKETING BUDGET

Whereas the share according to the Dutch CMO Survey is still 15.4% today, spending on social media will account for 23.5% of the total marketing budget in the next five years. The importance of social media is also emphasised in DVJ’s annual Brand Growth Study among 2,300 marketers. Of all marketing tools, social media is used the most to influence the moment of purchase of consumers (47%).

On the other hand, advertising avoidance is increasingly the norm. Especially in countries like the Netherlands, Switzerland, South Korea and Belgium, advertisements are often avoided. These scores are even higher among Gen-Z, the group that is predominantly on social media. So, having a strong creative to attract and hold attention is crucial. And perhaps even more so than with TV, for example.

SCROLLING IS THE NEW WATCHING

The fact that social media marketing is a growing business is no surprise when you look at the media use of consumers. In the Netherlands, for example, we spend an average of 107 minutes a day going through our feeds. By comparison, we watch an average of 128 minutes of live TV per day. If we look at teenagers between 15 and 19 years old, social media has now more than overtaken watching TV: they spend 156 minutes a day on social media, and 56 minutes in front of the TV – a difference of one and a half hours! As such, social media compares favourably to a traditionally dominant medium such as TV. But are social media video ads on for instance Facebook and Instagram similarly effective as TV ads in improving consumers’ brand knowledge and attitudes?

RESEARCH ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

To gain more insight into this question, DVJ Insights conducted a study in collaboration with the University of Groningen among more than 5,000 respondents in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The study aimed to assess how consumers engage with social video advertisements, and how these ads affect brand and message recall. Each of the respondents was presented with a set of websites on his or her smartphone through which they could scroll. Some of these consisted of social media ‘feeds’ containing one of 100 possible video ads. We tracked the time each video was kept ‘in focus’ by the respondent. After having browsed through each website, we asked them which brands and messages they remembered seeing.

Consumers spend an average of 1.8 seconds watching a video ad on social media

LESS THAN TWO SECONDS

The research yielded some interesting insights. It turned out that the average consumer spends less than 2 seconds (about 1.8) watching a social video ad. Even for the ads that scored best on engagement, the consumer’s attention span never passed 5 seconds. In addition, the willingness of consumers to watch an ad on social media is a whopping three times lower than for TV!

If we zoom in further on the differences between social media and TV, we see that 7% of consumers watch a social media ad in its entirety, versus 65% for TV. We also see similar differences in what consumers remember about an ad afterwards – after seeing the ad, unaided brand recall is on average 13% for social media, compared to 48% for TV. For assisted brand recall, social media scores an average of 40%, with TV doing much better here too at 71%.

EARLY BRAND CUE IS CRUCIAL

The lower scores of social video advertisements (compared to TV commercials) concerning recall are not too surprising, given that consumers also lose attention way more quickly when watching these videos – remember the less-than-2-seconds average viewing time! This not only makes it important for marketers to make their social video advertisements stand out immediately but also to include a clear brand cue as soon as possible. Our study reveals that such a practice indeed produces (significant) positive results. Among advertisements in which the first brand cue appears within the 2-second mark (i.e., before consumers scroll further along in the feed), unaided brand recall levels are 1.4 times as high as those for advertisements in which the first brand cue only appears after two seconds.

FORMIDABLE COMPETITOR TO TV?

While social video advertising has become a great competitor to TV advertising in terms of potential reach, it cannot command the same attention-grabbing (and: attention-holding) power and impact on the brand’s prominence in the consumer’s mind. However, the potential benefits of targeting social video advertisements to a specific audience are undeniable. The variation between the different advertisements that were tested in our study reveals that with the right creative execution and branding, social video advertisements can also be highly successful in shifting consumers’ knowledge of, and attitudes towards, a brand.

Click here to view the infographic in full screen.

THE DO’S OF SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

The temptation is great to utilise social based on in-house developed social ads or as a simplified “clone” of a TVC. But social media has its own laws. You need to know the creative effect in advance and adjust it instead of carrying out campaign optimisation during the campaign itself. Furthermore, a realistic environment is needed to pre-test video advertisements and measure the real ‘stopping power’, the impact on memory and creative quality. However, this realistic environment goes far beyond the ability to watch or not watch. The research must take place on a mobile phone (the device with which social media is primarily consumed) and must consider this volatile way of consuming. Not just the study must be adjusted to the medium – but also the creative. As a marketer, never fall into the trap of watching the full creative to judge it – rather, base your first impression of a new social video on the first 1.5 seconds. In a short space of time, the message and brand must be clear. And is the video sufficiently attractive to watch in its entirety? All this input forms the basis for further optimisation of the creative and for improving message recall, brand recall, and engagement.