The cross-media opportunity: How digital advertising can help build brand equity

Takeaways

• New research by AudienceProject and GfK, commissioned by Meta, reveals how different marketing channels can help drive brand impact and efficiency.
• Results across 32 cross-media campaigns from 28 leading brands in Europe reveal that ads on Meta technologies drive brand equity across the whole marketing funnel at efficient cost, across a number of metrics from brand awareness to brand favourability and purchase action.
• Marketers can optimise for higher impact and efficiency by increasing the share of digital media in the mix and leveraging synergies with TV.

Brand building is critical to the long term success of business performance. With 67% of marketing spend being spent in digital media according to GroupM and 72% of media time of consumers being spent in digital according to the Global Web Index, the question of how brands can leverage the potential of digital media for brand building has become an important one.

New research from Meta reveals how cross-media campaigns build brand equity today. For the research across 32 cross-media campaigns and 8 countries in Europe, Meta partnered with 28 leading brands in Europe and research partners AudienceProject and GfK to identify how brands can optimise their marketing mix for brand building.

Key findings

• Meta builds brands: Ads on Meta technologies drove brand equity across the whole marketing funnel at efficient cost. Meta technologies drove brand desirability with an average lift of 3.1 percentage points on brand favorability and a 5.1 percentage point lift on purchase action according to results by GfK.
• Meta allows marketers to build brand equity efficiently: Upper funnel brand impact (ad recall, brand awareness) was achieved at 30%-56% of TV costs according to analysis by AudienceProject.*
• Combining TV and Meta technologies can drive higher impact: Synergies between TV and Meta technologies proved to be highly effective. Adding Facebook and Instagram to TV campaigns more than doubled the impact on purchase action according to analysis by GfK.
• Both TV and digital media channels were found to be effective in building brand equity.

Learnings for marketers

• Increasing the share of digital media in the mix can drive significant efficiencies for brand campaigns: Meta technologies were identified by AudienceProject as generating the most efficient gross reach across all tested channels, with 9% net budget share leading to 18% share of impressions* and delivering 23%-31% of its reach exclusively in both GfKs and AudienceProject’s analysis.
• Scaling reach on Meta technologies supports brand building activities without diminishing impact: even on a higher reach share of >=24% for 18+ audiences, ads on Facebook and Instagram didn’t show diminishing returns in brand impact according to the analysis by AudienceProject.
• Test and learn: in order to maximise the impact of a more balanced marketing mix, marketers should test the value of balancing investments in different channels for their brand. A rigorous test and learn approach for cross-media brand building campaigns helps marketers achieve the efficiencies they aim for.

*on current investment levels where net costs were available.

Case study: Heineken

For the launch of Strongbow Ultra, Heineken and Meta partnered with AudienceProject to measure on-target, incremental reach and brand results across Facebook and Instagram, TV and YouTube. The campaign was aimed at an 18-44 audience with a mixture of reach and video view solutions. The media effectiveness and brand impact was measured by channel to validate the results.

Key results

• 11X more efficient than TV at driving reach with Facebook and Instagram
• 50% of the reach from Facebook and Instagram was incremental to the campaign
• 22ppt lift in incremental brand awareness driven by Facebook and Instagram and TV together

Case study: TOD’S

In the spring of 2022, TOD’S launched ‘Generations: A Family Story’, to promote the re-launch of its iconic Gommino shoe range. TOD’S wanted to verify campaign effectiveness in driving brand KPIs and understand the role that each media channel in the mix played within the campaign. The company was one of the first luxury brands to run global cross-channel brand measurement with GfK in collaboration with Meta.Read the full case study here.