Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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October 12, 2006
Online Advertising Can Drive Brand Awareness and Brand Association - Post 2 of 3
This is the second in a series of three posts looking at the impact of advertising spend on online behaivour based on findings from our Media Impact Report that we published with i-level and Yahoo! Search Marketing. In this post I will discuss the research that led us to the conclusion that online can be a highly effective medium for raising brand awareness and driving brand association.
Television has historically been viewed as a brand building medium while online has largely been considered a direct response medium. Marketers are increasingly looking for opportunities online, but the web has yet to be accepted as a means to build brand awareness. However, recent research shows that consumers spend as much as 164 minutes each day online compared to 148 minutes watching television. This shift in media consumption along with our analysis indicate that online can be an effective medium for raising brand awareness and can shift brand association. The findings support the move to bring a larger share of marketing spend online.
The most compelling example we found was for Sky. When we were doing the analysis we noticed that whilst media spend for Sky enjoyed a very strong positive correlation with searches for the Sky brand and for the Sky URL ("www.sky.com" and "sky.com") that same correlation didn't exist with share of visits to Sky.com. We were a bit stumped and so looked into it further. We found that visits and spend followed a similar pattern until February of 2006. At that point, visits to www.sky.com took off, while media spend tapered off.
Our analysis led us to online advertising, and banners in particular. The chart below shows the share of UK internet searches for "sky hd", "hd tv" and "hd" and illustrates that searches for "sky hd" significantly outweigh searches for "hd tv" by a factor of 8 to 1 in the week to 25th February 2006. This indicates that banner advertising, word of mouth, and search marketing used to promote the product successfully connected Sky with the HD category.
Sky opened HD for pre-registration in February 2006 and the product launched in April. In April, HD related terms were among the highest volume terms sending visits to Sky.com. The search term "sky hd" accounted for 5% of website visits in the four weeks to 22nd April 2006 and was the third highest volume term sending visits to the website.
Online activity (banner and search) also drove website visits, in particular from February 2006 forward. Site visits reached a higher peak in February 2006 than in the Autumn of 2005; the business' natural seasonal peak. While the offer no doubt influenced this success enormously, the online promotions communicating the offer contributed to brand awareness and website visits.
The report includes other examples of how online can build brand awareness and part 1 in the series can be read here.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:36 AM
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