Over the last few years, consumers have increased, not decreased, the time they spend watching television content. This might sound like good news for advertisers, save for two important caveats. First, while attention time dedicated to TV content has been rising, this is not the case for people actually paying attention to the ads on the screen. Second, when consumers are watching TV they are increasingly dividing their attention between the TV set and other devices, particularly tablets and other mobile devices. A 2011 Nielsen Co. survey showed that as much as 40% of time watching TV is spent on such media multitasking activities, and it’s likely that this behavior has accelerated over the past three years.
While many advertisers are rightly nervous about multitasking, there could be new opportunities to benefit from this trend. My recent working paper with researchers Jura Liaukonyte and Kenneth Wilbur tries to pinpoint what, exactly, these benefits might be – and how they can be achieved.
It turns out there’s both good news and bad news when it comes to the answers: Our research found that, among multitaskers, certain types of ads are more (or less) effective in terms of driving TV viewers online. And in one of our most surprising findings, we learned that there is no single ad type can accomplish both the tasks of increasing the number of visitations to the website and the number of online purchases.
To come to these, and other, conclusions, we constructed a massive dataset of television advertising in 2010 (the year tablet sales skyrocketed). We also focused on five industries that represented $4.2 billion in U.S. TV ad expenditures and accounted for most of the e-commerce that year: Apparel, telecom, travel, pizza, and online services and content. To measure the effect of TV ads on online behavior immediately after an ad was aired, we matched TV advertising data with the website visits and online purchases of 100,000 participants on a second-by-second basis.
We also classified ads into four types:
- A direct-response ad with a product-focus, intended to showcase particular products and features
- An action-focused ad, intended to induce an action such as search, visit, or buy
- An imagery-focused ad, which makes use of stunning images and sensory stimulation
- An emotion-focused ad that engages by evoking specific feelings
The results: Among multitaskers, we found that the imagery-focus ads are the least effective of all four ad types in terms of driving online purchases. They don’t increase the number of people that visit the brand’s website and actually reduce the likelihood that TV viewers will momentarily purchase any product. Of course, imagery-focus ads are known to be among the most traditionally effective types of TV ads because they are good at engaging viewers with strong visuals. But it is precisely this effect on engagement that makes viewers pay greater attention to the TV rather than switching attention to a lower and self-paced media such as the Internet.
Among the best ads to drive multitaskers to the brand’s website are action-focus ads. It turns out those ads that urge people to go online, versus those that do not, actually accomplish their goal to a great extent. The downside is these ads are not more persuasive than other ad types at getting people to actually make a purchase. For some brands, action-focus ads can indirectly increase sales in the short term, particularly if the website is designed to complement the TV ad. This is the case of a Target ad urging people to go online. Within two minutes of the ad appearing on TV, there was a 30% spike in direct website visits by those who typed “Target.com” and indirect visits by those who used a search engine.
A significant portion of these incremental visitors made a purchase on the website during their visit.
Product- and emotion-focus ads carry similar impact, though emotion-focus ads are a bit more effective. Both types increase the number of purchases online, but also result in fewer total visits to the website. In other words, people who decide to visit the brand’s website are more inclined to purchase, but the ad itself does not increase a TV viewer’s desire to visit the website immediately. It turns out that a focus on product or brand can be persuasive when consumers eventually decide to shop, but it does not motivate multitaskers to act impulsively.
Importantly, no single ad type can accomplish both tasks of increasing the number of visitations to the website and the number of purchases.
So what does all this mean for advertisers? Well, like most things, it really depends on what product you are selling, your brand, your audience, and your strategic goals. If you sell online and have a reason to believe that you are advertising to a multitasking audience, then TV ads that were created to operate under high levels of attention, such as imagery-focus ads, will not work. This is the case for young viewers, as they multitask most of the time, and for older viewers, who multitask early in the morning and in the evening. In these cases, one should opt for action-focus ads regardless of the brand or industry.
The chart shows the impact of each type of ad on online sales for various brands studied. Brands such as Amazon and eHarmony, a dating website, have a stronger incentive to use particular types of ad content. For them, choosing the appropriate creative execution can mean the difference between higher or lower online sales. For brands in other industries, such as Papa John’s, a pizza delivery chain, the type of ad used doesn’t matter as much.
Importantly, advertisers can actually benefit from the increasing trend of consumers engaging in media multitasking by crafting more appropriate ads. Lower, or divided, attention is not necessarily bad news as long as advertisers target the most effective content to their audience, and use the TV ad as a springboard for consumers to engage with the brand online and ultimately make a purchase.
–Thales Teixeira, assistant professor in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School.
Reprinted with permission.
