Relevance & Research Question:

Media budgets for online ads are rising year-by-year. Advertisers need to understand how their various banner campaigns perform in terms of both creative guidelines (create compelling creative executions) and media planning (which ads and formats should be used). In 2016, Aktion Mensch conducted an ad effectiveness study on their online display campaigns. By simulating a realistic media contact we investigated the question how the different ads do perform in terms of awareness, image, and buying intention. Which ad can hold the users’ attention the longest? Are there differences between formats? Which ad execution attracts consumers in the most successful way?

Methods & Data:

We tested 10 different creatives with 1000 participants in an online study in six fielding days. The In-Context-testing-method employs a hidden design in order to produce realistic results: The original ads are inserted into a live website and the respondents’ task is browsing this website for some minutes, during which attention is captured using their webcam. Afterwards users are invited to answer ad effectiveness questions. Additionally, a reaction time based tool was deployed to assess effects on the implicit brand image.

Results:

The results demonstrate a clear effect of the different creatives. Attention on the ads varies from 400 ms to over 1,5 sec. Some ads were looked at only by 17% while others could attract the attention of half of the users. The effects were stronger for different creatives than for different formats. The different motives showed unique ad effectiveness patterns and general guidelines for the production of display ads were derived.

Added Value:

In our presentation we will show how state of the art online attention research tools are combined to a comprehensive test suite and easily applied to consumer understanding in digital marketing. Copy testing for digital communication leads to deep insights about how digital marketing communication is perceived, what is internalized by the users and how a successful creative execution should look like. It will underline how important it is for an advertiser to drive success of his online marketing campaigns with the help of consumer-centric, data-driven optimizations.