Think TV report claims TV ads still trump YouTube and Facebook

Consumers still buy after looking at TV ads more than their YouTube and Facebook counterparts, a report commissioned by Think TV and using artificial intelligence claims.

The TV advocacy group recently asked marketing science academic, Professor Karen Nelson-Field, to undertake a new study using eye-tracking software to find out the true ‘attention impact’ of video ads consumed across the different media platforms.

In the research, 2583 Australians were exposed to 18,219 advertisements under natural viewing conditions in the home. Respondents were then tasked to go shopping in an online shopping mall, where they were able to consider up to 38,745 different brands including the ones they were exposed to in the study’s advertising.

According to the research, TV ads came out 24.1 per cent stronger than YouTube and 22 per cent stronger than Facebook. The study also celebrated TV’s greater ‘screen coverage’ - the percentage of a screen occupied by an ad - with TV coming out on top at 100 per cent.

The report then took this to mean TV provided 10 times more 'coverage' on average than Facebook and three times more coverage than Youtube, which due to their social nature naturally contain other content elements when consumers scroll down.

Interestingly, when it comes to maximising consumer engagement, the research showed that the size, frequency and speed of introduction of a brand or product within a commercial correlated to attention and sales impact. Ads that produced greater sales impact showed the brand at twice the size of poorly-performing ads showed the brand almost twice as often and were more likely to display the brand within the first two seconds.

Professor Nelson-Field said the report was aimed at getting under the hood of all the major video advertising platforms and helps advertisers make informed inventory choices when selecting media.

“Using in-home, natural viewing conditions, the report provides a clear understanding of why certain platforms drive higher levels of attention and greater levels of advertising impact than others,” she said.

Think TV Australia was formed in May 2016 with founding members Nine Network, Seven Network, Network Ten and Multi Channel Network/Foxtel. The report was released just a day after CBS announced its intention to buy out financially troubled Channel Ten.

Speaking at a media briefing at Think TV's offices in Sydney, the company's director of research and insights, Steve Weaver, insisted the report wasn’t about pushing TV as the best advertising option onto everyone and was about simply sharing unbiased data.

“We deliberately wanted to genuinely give you the data and say, here is the data, you make the assessment,” Weaver said. “People are always going to buy TV and online and print, all we can do is continue putting the data out there, so we can all make informed decisions."

The report did not break down the impact of video ads across the various media channels according to age demographics, so any sign of whether millennials and the next generation of viewers were less impacted by TV than their older generational counterparts was unclear.

The second tranche of Nelson-Field’s findings will be released at the ReThinkTV conference on 14 September.

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