1. How often should I visit my best prescribing doctors if not every month

   Your best prescribing doctors are unlikely to prescribe even more often than they already do but are also fairly unlikely to switch. A good approach might be to try an A/B experiment to see how much time could be devoted to signing up new doctors.

2. If I have to reach out to new prescribers which ones should I start with since I don’t have the budget to target broadly?

   Heavy category prescribers and specialists are a good bet not because they can be persuaded to become 100% loyal, but because they have wider repertoires. But your new customers will be light and heavy in the same way as your current customers are.

3. How can I stretch my media budget without targeting?

   Not all targeting is wrong – certain categories are gender, specialism or age specific obviously. Otherwise, explore the evidence in the advertising and media reports on the institute website, particularly on shorter TV ads, outdoor media and the number of channels to achieve cumulative reach and mental availability.

4. Surely I can go dark when advertising seasonal remedies?

   Why would you? Advertising works in memory – critical to maintain brand associations as broadly as possible. And perhaps less clutter out of season too.

P.S. & C.G.
21 March 2025

What research do you have available/would you recommend around metrics of reach and engagement?

We prescribe an emphasis on reach-based planning regardless of the media that you are using, because that is what the generalised evidence from decades of best-in-class Single Source studies tell us about how advertising and media impacts behaviour. But we can also appreciate some questions being raised amongst practitioners in recent years about whether all reach is equal, and what makes better quality reach. And we agree, not all reach is equal.

But what we disagree with such practitioners on is what makes better quality reach. In particular, we don’t agree that you should “throw away the baby with the bath water”, by taking on approaches and constructs that contradict established knowledge. And, unfortunately this often seems to be what happens in this space. Measures like engagement (attention is just engagement in new clothes) have been put forward for many decades as ways of determining whether reach quality is high. Alas, the actual evidence that your ads need to get more attention, to engage more or to result in conversion or click-through in order to be effective is sadly lacking.

Many of these arguments for such measures run counter long established evidence. For instance, Robert Heath nearly 20 years ago pointed out that audiences pay little attention to advertising, and this hasn’t changed (even beyond TV advertising with digital advertising), so do we really want to make this 70 years of the wrong advertising model?

In short, advertising needs to work by creating and refreshing memory structures, which will in turn nudge propensities to buy, rather than bring about seismic shifts to buying or to convert or change behaviour. And this is the case regardless of the type of media you are using (digital or otherwise). Many of the digital platforms for instance, offer awareness, traffic or conversion campaigns, and optimise for impressions or click through according to the advertisers’ objective. Our recommendation would be to worry less about the engagement you get and more simply about the scale of the audience for all of your communication (digital; or otherwise). In this example, a digital awareness campaign may not be the ultimate reach-based campaign, but they will get you heading in the right direction (in comparison to aiming for maximum conversion, which mainly delivers heavy users who were going to buy regardless of any advertising exposure).The following answer to another sponsor’s question from our website, may be of further interest: What is the Ehrenberg-Bass guideline for an effective digital marketing strategy?

E.R.
21 March 2025

I was wondering if you have seen any research on ‘in market’ ad recall testing? And what you would suggest to replace it?

I’ve seen lots of work on ad recall not being a valid measure because ads can successfully build memory structures without the ad itself being remembered. And I’ve seen a lot of work around the how brand size skews recall measures

I know EBI does Category Entry Point analysis and measurement. Is that a better approach to quantifying post impression impact?

Yes ad recall is not a great metric, mainly because most ad recall measures are not very specific and involve recall of the brand, not the ad (e.g., Have you seen advertising for any of the following brands in the last 3 months?  KOT). And yes because it often involves retrieval of the brand, there is a brand user bias, but it is important to note that this bias occurs even when there is no brand name retrieval involved (e.g., execution only retrieval), albeit at a lower level.  It’s actually about our selective attention, so something in the real world, and also in our measurement.

Recognition measures are better, funnily enough we were talking about these yesterday.  They are better than recall, but there will be instances where they might be problematic – e.g., if you have a very distinctive ad style, might be difficult for people to separate out executions etc.  But the issue is why do you want to check if people remember the ad?  Is it to check the reach (e.g., did if reach 45% of category buyers)?  Is it to check if a particular medium in reaching people (e.g., advertising on YouTube)?  And if people remember the creative, do they also remember the brand? (To get correct branding scores).

So these are more initial measures of the advertising having the underlying conditions for success.  They are useful to assess early to avoid spending too much money on a dud.  We are doing more R&D on this.

This is different from checking if the advertising did successfully build memories/mental availability.  For that you need to know what people took away from the ad (the brand, the message) and then was that processed in long term memory (which is what CEP measurement does).

My thoughts are to first check you have the conditions for success: branding, creative and messaging.  Then the distribution to get scale of success (reach).  This should be done before launch or just after, so you can adjust if below par.

Then you can measure the impact via brand memories (e.g., CEP measurement if your aim is to shift CEPs or build Mental Availability generally).

But I only recommend using post hoc ad memorability measures in brand health tracking as a check on longer term reach and branding quality across all major activities to set up the parameters for potential change in brand memories, not to assess the specific executions.  I talk about this a bit in Better Brand Health, in the chapter on measuring marketing activity.

J.R

11 Oct 2024

Has there been any research done on the expected lag time between increases in advertising spend and corresponding rises in brand awareness?

One of our brands initiated an “always on” media strategy in January 2024, somewhat aligning with the institute’s guidelines to avoid burst campaigns. The team is still somewhat focused on “heavy up” moments, but we’re getting better. However, the team is concerned that the additional media efforts are not reflected in our Unaided Awareness figures from January to April.

Is it accurate to conclude that awareness metrics may not be appropriate for assessing the immediate effectiveness of advertising spend? From my search on “awareness” in the FAQs, this seems to be the general guidance.

If Unaided Awareness is not the best metric, what alternative metrics should we consider to evaluate the effectiveness of our advertising spend?

One of the struggles with the always on media strategy is that brands no longer see those big spikes in awareness as there is no longer a big volume of people being reach simultaneously with high frequency (strong recency effect), rather you have more people reached at a lower frequency (for the same $$) there by maximising the effect from your media budget (i.e. more people reached in close proximity to purchase but not necessarily to measurement). So, this won’t have a positive effect on the tracker compared to tracking dips align with the brand activities to ‘measure’ them after, it’s true that more advertising has more effect and that will be seen in awareness spike in the tracking. Does that make sense? Happy to clarify further if helpful.

I link to the paper on usage effects on metrics – so need to understand the composition of the respondents on the tracker in respect to usage (Vaughan, Beal & Romaniuk, 2018).

This area of research above advocates for the use of a recognition measure using the advertising stimuli – usually unbranded to then be able to capture if correct brand take out is also achieved. Recognition is an easier memory task – and the gap between users and non-users is reduced. However, the same issue of timing and weight of spend relative to when the measurement is undertaken will persist.

We are also expanding our work looking at using Mental Availability metrics to capture the effect of advertising but again usage has an effect here as does the weight of activity (and competitor activity) in the immediate lead-up to measurement (as we know recency effects are real i.e. advertising has more effect close in time i.e. memories decay over time). This research is not published as a sponsor report yet, but we have had 2 master’s theses competed in the area – one using tracking data and one using an experiment to control for ad exposure (Vaughan, 2016), (Underwood, 2023). I attach descriptions below of both BUT mindful that you likely not keen to read a master’s thesis (if you are keen, they can be downloaded from the website).

V.B

19 June 2024

References:

• Vaughan, K., Beal, V., & Romaniuk, J. (2018). It really is harder to get non-user to remember your advertising. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Report 87
• Vaughan, K. (2016). How do mental availability metrics respond to advertising? Ehrenberg-Bass Masters Thesis
• Underwood, D. (2023). A Replication and Extension of ‘Measuring advertising’s effect on mental availability’. Ehrenberg-Bass Masters Thesis

What case studies do you have that show brands growing and what they did. You say “get more buyers”, but what are the practical examples of getting more buyers?

We prefer not to focus on case studies and instead focus on the robust knowledge that holds across broad or specified conditions. Some top line examples of what getting more buyers looks like includes:

• Increasing distribution e.g. to new outlets where you get to additional category buyers;
• Increasing reach of communications so brand comes to mind for more people in the range of situations where they might buy;
• Ensuring coverage of the market e.g. range of pack sizes and types that suit diversity of needs in the category;
• Overcome barriers that stop some buyers buying some of the time (e.g. addition of lower or zero alcohol SKUs).

E.R.
16 March 2023

Within OTC Marketing we are strong believers in the Ehrenberg-Bass media approach calling for the maximising reach and continuity when it comes to brand comms. Especially in our case, with most of our target group being older population the main medium remains TV.

Still we are constantly being challenged to go more digital, even more in the last year when “digitalisation” hype got even bigger.

Currently I am required to prepare digital guidelines for our OTC Markets. I would be looking for your real life expertise on the actual effectiveness of digital media. Which digital strategies, touchpoints have positive ROI? How to construct synergistic TV – Digital – POS model, instead of chasing current trends – e.g. having a one off campaign in Tik-Tok?

I know that the matter here is very complex and there is no simple answer, but maybe you could share some learnings that could be a base for the further discussion.

Yes, Digital Media is one of the fastest evolving areas in marketing with changing media consumption habits, new digital platforms such as Tik-Tok and tactics like influencing marketing. We believe that now more than ever organisations require an evidence-based approach to navigate all aspects of Media and Digital Marketing.

Below we have provided a high-level evidence-based perspective on Digital Media. We also thought it would be useful to let you know about our Media Consultancy services, which partners our Ehrenberg-Bass Sponsors with our Media Experts to explore these topics in further detail (additional fee applies). Please contact us for further information on Optimising Media for Growth.

In response to your email, the first thing is to define the objective of Digital Marketing. We can broadly put the role of Digital Campaigning into two categories, Performance Marketing and Brand Building.

Performance Marketing (increase clicks to sale, lower cost per click)
Key Performance Indicators: Cost Per Click, Click, Click Through Rate (CTR), Cost Per Conversion.
For example: Google Search, Retargeting etc.

Brand Building (increase reach, views)
Key Performance Indicators: Reach, On Target Accuracy, Viewability, Views, View Through Rate, Brand Uplift.
For example: YouTube Pre-roll, Programmatic Online Video, Instagram/ Tik-Tok etc

Please note:
· Metrics such as shares, or organic reach should just be factored into the Cost Per Reach metric.
· Metrics like engagement (CTR) are only ‘vanity’ metrics and are not linked to sale (Nielsen Study)

Digital Marketing campaigns should always have a single Key Performance Indicator clearly defined as it will allow the agency to optimise the metric that matters for your brand in the platform’s tools. It also allows you to then evaluate the metrics of the digital channel vs other non-digital channels.

Performance Marketing
In the past few years there has been a move away from Performance Marketing, see recent examples; Airbnb and Adidas.

There are two key issues with Performance Marketing:

1. It is focused on last-click-attribution. Return on Investment (ROI) for Performance Marketing is overstated as it doesn’t acknowledge the much more important role of ‘upper funnel’ or brand building advertising.
2. It inherently targets people that are already in the market to buy your brand, normally via Google Ads. Often those who clicked on the ad were already going to buy the brand.

Please read: The Correspondent Article.

Therefore, when brands turn off Performance Marketing it often does not have a massive impact on sales. We would encourage you to review the implications of reducing Performance Marketing.

Brand Building
Really, here we are talking about video content, the key elements being, reach, continuity, and effectiveness.

The majority of time spent consuming video content is still linear TV, this includes younger audiences. Here is a UK based example: Thinkbox.

The time spent watching video on linear TV is slowly declining but is forecasted for the next decade to remain a key media. TV is not dead. This means that for most markets/ categories/brands as a rule of thumb, 20-30% of video investment should be in digital video, no more. This being subject to the right digital video quality standards.

It is also important to consider if the video content is ‘fit for purpose’ on digital channels as most consumers won’t watch more than 10 seconds worth of content.

You may get higher ROIs from other media types, but it is critical to look at the scale or the ROI. Always look at ROI and Volume Contribution, across media channels. TV will win here, as digital ROIs cannot (generally) scale efficiently.

Media Channel Optimisation
Having online video in the mix can (typically) help to do the following:

1. Increase incremental reach at the same cost (normally 3-5%) on a broad target audience.
2. Won’t increase reach levels but distributes more impressions to younger audiences.

This would be the first thing to check with the media agency. If it does achieve any of these then it is the primary reason to move investments to online video.

If not, digital video can still help to get multiple messages that you could not support with TV alone due to production costs, it can also help if you need to get longer-form information ‘help-content’ or links to actions, more information.

Control Digital Frequency
We recommend tracking Reach and Frequency of digital campaigns, not impressions. Frequency cap digital campaigns to help increase efficient reach and avoid annoyance. We recommend a cap of one Opportunity to See (OTS) per week.

Viewability
A common trap for the last decade is to buy cheap digital video inventory. Unfortunately, much of this is not viewable. Typically, what this is leading to is an understanding to go for more premium and visible video inventory that has more chance of gaining attention and driving brand metrics. Screen coverage is a good proxy to assess the effectiveness of the site, platform.

In addition to viewability third-party verification will also help to determine brand safety levels meaning which sites and content you don’t want your brand ads to appear on.

It is important to consider that TV has the advantage of 100% of the screen without clutter. However, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has shown that;
· 1/3rd of the time people are actively watching TV
· 1/3rd of the time they are passively watching
· 1/3rd of the time they are actively avoiding

Therefore, TV does not have 100% viewability.

Targeting
The main publicised advantage of Digital Marketing is that you can target. Although the quality and accuracy of targeting depends on the data sources (Peter Weinberg, LinkedIn).

We would recommend deploying methods that allow you to target the category consumer (on target accuracy) but not smaller targets. Likewise, recommending caution in deploying different creative to different segments and suggest that you test and learn to determine the upside benefit vs cost. If there are different Category Entry Points by segment, it might indicate that different creative will work on different segments.

We do not suggest over investing in tactics that target/recruit heavy consumers. It might seem counterintuitive, but you want to see a lower ROI as you want to target light and medium category consumers.

Key Opinion Leaders and Influencers (i.e., Instagram / TiK-Tok)
Key opinion leaders and influencers on Tik-Tok, Instagram etc can reach audiences with credible recommendations. There are both good and bad examples.

The risk associated with these tactics is:
a. the reach levels are lower than a simple paid strategy.
b. all category consumers demographics are not reached i.e., older audiences not on Tik-Tok.
c. the Key Opinion Leader (KOL)/influence creates clutter for the brand and brand message
d. the campaign is often not continuous
e. it can seem fake and reflect poorly on the brand

Please note:
· Metrics like Earner Media Value (EMV) used to assess the total value of the reach of an influencer are often inflated numbers.
· Influencers do not reach all their followers with each post; you should also deploy a paid media strategy to amplify the posts.
· Data transparency here is an issue, as the posts are often not controlled by the organisation’s platforms.

Social Media / New Platforms – Tik-Tok
Historically brand’s social media fan bases have been relatively small compared to the overall reach of the platform and heavily skewed to heavy brand (attitudinally loyal) buyers. These are only a small proportion of the category consumers and to grow you need to think more broadly. We do not recommend over-investing in developing fans/followers on social platforms.

With all new platforms it is important to return to the key objectives:
· Reach/Cost per Reach – considering scale.
· % On target (category buyers)
· Viewability and/or view through rate
· Brand cut-through/brand uplift

I hope this helps you to start navigating your Digital Marketing Strategy.

S.W.
24 June 2021

What is the role of outdoor media in my marketing mix? How does outdoor compare with other types of brand support? And what is the best practice for outdoor to maximise effectiveness?

Video Transcript

Danielle Talbot:  Hello, my name is Danielle Talbot and today I’ll be talking about outdoor advertising. We were recently asked:

What is the role of outdoor media in my marketing mix? How does outdoor compare with other types of brand support? And what is the best practice for outdoor to maximise effectiveness?

These are all really great questions!

In comparison to other mediums, outdoor has high visibility and wide local coverage. It provides greater opportunities for flexibility, relevance and dynamic real-time creative. Outdoor is also considered to be a cost-effective media supplement – supporting previous exposure to other mediums, and reaching harder to reach people, such as light TV viewers.

However, outdoor typically allows for only a brief exposure of a limited, visual message. This means brands don’t have the opportunity to share a detailed message or strengthen their auditory cues. In comparison to other more targeted media, outdoor does have greater wastage and has to compete for attention in a highly cluttered environment. It’s also difficult to measure outdoor, with concerns around metrics, transparency and accountability. But the good news is that the industry is advancing in this area.

Our research into the value of outdoor advertising is currently underway. But here are three key principles of best practice to prioritise when incorporating outdoor into your media mix:

1. Use big, recognisable branding with simple brand messaging and imagery. Remember that people who come across outdoor advertising are focusing on something else, such as walking or driving, so attention is generally quite low – around just six seconds. Use outdoor as a ‘reminder’ medium, extending messages conveyed through your other media.
2. Buy spaces with the most relevance, close to the point-of-purchase. Ideally, a combination of outdoor formats is recommended to reach different people in different ways. Make the campaign cohesive across these formats, but use differing formats creatively.
3. Finally, aim to achieve high reach by using a number of outdoor advertising spaces in different locations. For example, purchasing a single large format billboard in a prime, high traffic area in each city, with other smaller formats supporting this message in other areas. Negotiate greater discounts for longer-term commitment and discover what’s possible within your budget.

That’s it for this week! Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answered, please contact your Sponsor Officer or ask via our website.

For more information:

BEST PRACTICE: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Key Media Principles

Opportunity To See

A Guide to Continuous-Reach Advertising

How advertisers rate media buys: Developing rules of thumb to guide media selection

Light TV Viewers: young & desirable or just hard to reach?

Is there research to shed light on whether running advertising and price promotions at the same time is good practice? Or should we try to limit price promotion activities when we run an advertising campaign?

Video Transcript

Dr. Steven Dunn:   Hi, I’m Dr. Steven Dunn and this week I’ll be addressing a question relating to price promotions and advertising.

A useful starting point here can be first to discuss what we know about price promotions and advertising and their best practices. First, what do we know about price promotions? Well price promotions are a tactic for short-term sales activation. They’ll reliably give you a boost to your sales but only for the duration of the discount. Price promotions do not have a long term brand building effect. A brand’s promotion is typically bought by the people who already have the brand in their repertoire. Given the lack of positive long term effects from price promotions, we recommend evaluating these in terms of their profitability. Now most price promotions are not profitable, especially when we start taking into account the wide cannibalisation effects they have on the portfolio.

Next, what do we know about advertising? Well in contrast to price promotions, successful advertising produces both a short term response and a longer term brand building effect. Advertising working in the short term is a necessary condition for the advertising working in the long term – it’s not one or the other. The short term sales effects from advertising are more subtle compared to what we see from price promotions. Exposure to advertising is the role of nudging the propensities of the brands we thought of or noticed in the buying situation, essentially boosting its Mental Availability.

There are two key findings about the effects of advertising exposure on brand choice that we need to consider when thinking about scheduling our advertising. First, with regards to timing, an ad exposure will have a greater impact when it occurs closer to the purchase occasion. Second, regarding the number of exposures. The greatest impact is when a consumer goes from not seeing the ad, to seeing the ad. Subsequent exposures can still have an impact, but they follow diminishing returns. For these reasons, we recommend media plans that spread out advertising to be continuously on air throughout the year and maximise cumulative reach of category buyers.

We now arrive back at the original question of whether advertising the same time as price promotions is a good practice or whether it should be avoided. Now turning advertising on and off to coincide with price promotions essentially amounts to abandoning that ‘continuously on air’ strategy. Could this be justified? Well, we might want to coordinate these two activities if we saw much larger sales uplifts when they occur together, or if our advertising sales effects were less profitable when they occur with price promotions.

We’re conducting research in this space and we’ll be releasing our findings later in the year. But in the meantime, there’s still two things we want to be considering. First, even when advertising occurs at the same time as a price promotion, the advertising will have an impact on people who won’t be seeing the price promotion. Some people will be shopping at different channels or retailers where the brand isn’t on promotion in that week and other people might not be ready to purchase the category that week – they might come in and buy in 2, 3, 4 weeks time where that ad can still have a role in impacting their decisions. Second, turning advertising on and off rather than being continuously on air can lead to excess frequency and lower reach. This means that many advertising exposures will be less effective due to those diminishing returns that occur with multiple exposures.

Ultimately the key challenge is to manage advertising and price promotions separately for the best outcomes at the least cost. This means being continuously on air with advertising and treating price promotions as a cost of doing business with retailers in order to try and maintain or improve your Physical Availability. Aim to avoid deep, unprofitable price promotions regardless of whether or not they’re going to be coinciding with your advertising.

That’s it for this week and don’t forget to submit your own questions. Thanks!

For more information: 

Report 43: Price Promotions

Report 8: The Case Against Price-Related Promotions

Report 47: Cross-brand Cannibalization Kills the Profitability of Price Promotions

Report 66: Best Practice: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Key Media Principles

Senior Marketing Scientists Peilin Phua and Dr Giang Trinh answer: To my view, what has been the most influential work by Professor Gerald Goodhardt?

Video Transcript

Peilin Phua:   Hi everyone, I’m Peilin Phua. Today we will be talking about an underrated but extremely useful analysis for marketers – Conditional Trend Analysis, developed by Professor Gerald Goodhardt and Professor Andrew Ehrenberg.

What is Conditional Trend Analysis? 

I imagine many of you have heard of the Negative Binomial Distribution, or NBD, and how brand buying follows this pattern, that many of a brand’s buyers are light, few buyers are heavy, but the majority of consumers do not buy the brand. But the NBD can do so much more than just showing the distribution of brand buyers. It can predict future purchases using the conditional expectations of the model. And this is where Conditional Trend Analysis, or CTA, comes in handy. CTA is essentially an extension of the NBD model, that can be used to predict the future purchases of the non, light and heavy buyers or any individual buyer based on their past purchasing behaviour.

How is CTA useful for marketers?

CTA can help marketers to benchmark and track buying behaviour over time. Practitioners can use CTA to project sales growth of different buyer groups. It can also predict sales of new brand buyers as well as the churn rate of current brand buyers.

For example, suppose a brand manager has recently run a promotion and there is an increase in sales. The brand manager will be interested to know, whether the majority of the increased sales came from people who had never purchased the brand or if the majority are from the brand’s heavier buyers? If it was the first scenario, then that is great news! Because the brand had acquired new buyers! But if it was the second scenario, then it is not ideal because this means that the recent sales increase from the promotion has taken a bite from the brand’s future sales.

This sounds interesting, how can I learn more?

Well, the original paper was published in Journal of Marketing Research in 1967 and since then many authors such as Don Morrison, David Schmittlein, Richard Colombo, Peter Faders and Bruce Hardie have published studies that are based on the original idea of CTA. Dr Giang Trinh, a Senior Marketing Scientist at the Institute and I specialise in this area. We are currently investigating the implications of advertising cuts on brand purchasing using CTA. If you’re interested to learn more, check out the resources under this video! That’s all for today. Remember to keep sending in your questions and see you again soon.

For more information on understanding Dirichlet type markets click here.

Professor Gerald Goodhardt and Professor Byron Sharp in conversation

As a bonus to our Question of the Week video, we also share two videos of Professor Gerald Goodhardt and Professor Byron Sharp in conversation discussing myth breaking and the Duplication of Purchase Law. Watch the videos here.

I am reaching out to ask if you have any recommendations to deepen my Digital Marketing knowledge (books, articles, best practices or any other format)?

Report 66 and 57 are both being key starting points:
Report 66: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute Key Media Principles
Report 57: A Guide to Continuous-Reach Advertising

As starting readings I’d recommend these on digital targeting:
How accurate are digital targets?
Psychological micro-targeting: do we know if it works?

This academic article demonstrating online advertising and TV show similar responses in terms of sales, but there are some real complexities in measurement to consider:
Planning for Synergy: Harnessing the Power of Multi-Platform Media

There are the Beyond 30 reports – lab based studies that test new media options from a range of perspectives such as:
Can Twitter ads help TV ads?
How do viewers use Internet television devices?
Does program context affect pre-roll ads?
Minimum Effective Frequency for iTV Ads

And some research on online shopping
Shopping Takes Only Seconds…in-store and online

And links to others e.g. on online ad tactics
The efficacy of brand-execution tactics in TV advertising, brand placements, and internet advertising

More broadly, I’d recommend you look at the sections on the website on media decisions and social media.

Our text book Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice 2e. By: Byron Sharp is also a useful read.

R.K.
25 May 2020