The ARF is
holding their annual conference next week that will herald not only the arrival
of new President and CEO Dr. Scott McDonald, it will also highlight the continuation
and enhancement of three major research initiatives on mobile advertising
research and the impact of advertising pod context.
New Leadership
According to
the press release, Scott McDonald has held senior research positions at Time
Inc., Time Warner, and Conde Nast, working closely with all five of The ARF's
constituent groups – media, advertisers, agencies, research companies and ad
tech. In a meeting with the press this past week, he explained that he comes to
the ARF at “a critically important time for the media industry, partly because technological
change has introduced at least a doubling of the number of consumer touchpoints
available to marketers - many of which don’t involve media at all. This has fundamentally changed how we think
of ‘audience’ and has made the term more ambiguous and confusing than it was 10
years ago.”
He sees the
ARF as focused on a range of issues from “methods for message development and
understanding the consumer to highly technical problems of cross platform
measurement, advertising effectiveness attribution and ways of integrating big
data. These technical topics are very wonky but consume us because they remain
unresolved problems for the industry.”
We are
entering a complicated world where there are many challenges to the ad-supported
media business model. He noted, “Going into the Internet of Things, you are
going to have more and more marketing opportunities to connect with consumers
in conditions that are devoid of media like on the fitbit, driving in your car,
etc. The nature of advertising is changing in response to changes in technology
and consumer behavior. Getting a clear view of consumer behavior and
advertising impact has never been more important, more difficult or more
complex.”
ARF Research Initiatives
As the
industry gets more complicated, it is a great time for research. The ARF is
continuing on some major research initiatives as well as introducing new
ground-breaking work from member companies and suppliers. “One of the studies
that will be talked about at the annual meeting,” explained McDonald, “is an
effort by the ARF Research team, in collaboration with several of the member
companies, to try to quantify the value of specific media context. How is the performance of an ad affected – for
better or worse – by its media environment? How is it affected by the other ads around it?”
Jasper Snyder, EVP Research and Innovation outlined the
continuation of three major research initiatives by noting that, “We have
studies on creating effective mobile advertising, optimizing mobile research quality
through the impact of emojis in mobile surveys and exploring the ROI impact of
different types of context effects.” Previous How Advertising Works studies by the ARF have focused on the ROI of
cross-platform advertising, and using neuroscience to understand how brands are
built in the brain. “These studies not only quantified the impact of
cross-platform advertising for the first time but also established, through
neuroscience, the ways in which advertisers can optimize creative to take
advantage of cross-platform effects," he continued.
“Biometric and neuroscience measurement has proven that
optimizing creative to a specific platform provides a great opportunity to boost
ad effectiveness,” noted Dr. Manuel Garcia-Garcia, SVP, Research and
Innovation, who added, “The challenge we face now is how to improve mobile ad
creative so they are perceives as valuable and non-disruptive by the users.”
“One of the
jobs of the ARF is to lead with quality research that is pivotal to the
industry,” concluded McDonald, “Not only in providing quality research but also
trying to provide conceptual clarity that makes it easier for all participants
– media companies, ad agencies, advertisers and research companies - to be
clear about where they are operating and which questions are being addressed.”
This article first appeared in www.MediaBizBloggers.com
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