Creative Benchmarking Review challenges conventional beliefs.
What do a pair of undies, a homeless dog, toothpaste, a budget airline and cholesterol all have in common?
Probably not much – unless of course you’re talking about some of the most effective newspaper advertising of 2009, in which case they have one important thing in common: performance.
Last year, ads for Bonds, Pedigree, Colgate, Jetstar and Flora were among some of the major brands that outperformed industry norms and went beyond the roles traditionally associated with newspaper advertising.
This is one of the key findings of The 2009 Creative Benchmarking Review, a study that mounts a strong challenge to conventional thinking about how newspaper advertising works for advertisers, products and brands.
The 2009 Creative Benchmarking Review takes a selection of 25 newspaper ads from 2009 across a broad range of advertiser categories including FMCG, QSR, Retail, Travel, Insurance, Government and Pet Food, amongst others, and gauges their performance against The Newspaper Effectiveness Metric.
In doing so, the report shows how newspapers as an advertising medium influence consumer attitudes and behaviour in ways not previously available.
The Newspaper Works CEO, Tony Hale, said: “The Creative Benchmarking Review showcases some of last year’s most effective advertising, demonstrating how newspapers can be harnessed to connect with consumers in both proven and fresh ways.”
The Newspaper Effectiveness Metric, which combines recognised brand and advertising measures, provides a rigorously validated approach for understanding newspaper effectiveness and allows for benchmarking the performance of specific ads against an All Newspaper Norm*.
In addition, proprietary newspaper metrics have been developed with the unique attributes of newspapers in mind, referred to as the Six Strategic Roles known as Affinity; (Re)appraisal; Information; Call to Action; Public Agenda; and Extension.
The 2009 Creative Benchmarking Review has found, for example, that while newspapers have not traditionally been advertisers’ first choice of medium in the role of Affinity, there are in fact many cases where newspapers can be an extremely effective medium for strengthening consumers’ affinity for a particular brand.
Mars and KitKat, for instance, in 2009 both performed significantly above the All Newspaper Norm in the Affinity strategic role.
“Newspaper advertising provides a range of sometimes overlooked opportunities for advertisers to strengthen the affinity that consumers feel towards their brands,” Hale said.
“The Creative Benchmarking Review gives a very strong demonstration of how newspapers can be used across the full spectrum of strategic roles, some of which are traditionally associated roles for newspapers, such as Call to Action and Information.
“In this report, advertisers have demonstrated both expected and fresh ways to bring their communication to life while still delivering effective outcomes for their brands,” he said.
Download the report below.
*The All Newspaper Norm, against which these ads were tested, is based on 40 randomly selected newspaper ads, chosen and tested by Ipsos MediaCT in 2008. Like the ads featured in the report, they were tested against Australians aged 16+.
Note on Methodology: 2,475 respondents were surveyed in total, and more than 7,000 ad observations collected. All the measures reported for each ad are based on at least 100 respondents.
May 2010
