Measurement of Brand Lift from a Display Advertising Campaign

Introduction

Marketing is as old as the first business on earth. Once you build a business, you need to advertise to connect your business with customers. The process of connecting a business to customers is called marketing. Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in products or services.(Kotler, Armstrong, Wong, and Saunders, 2008) American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”(American Marketing Association, 2007) The vehicle for doing marketing is called an advertisement. A wave of advertisements to market a specific aspect of the business is called a marketing campaign. There is huge amount of money is spend on the marketing campaigns every year. E.g. Kantar Media reports that, “Total advertising expenditures in the first quarter of 2010 rose 5.1 percent from a year ago and finished the period at $31.3 billion.”(Daddi, 2010)

The advertisements are delivered to the consumer through the media frequently consumed by the consumer. As media consumption patterns changed, the best medium to deliver advertisements to consumers has changed with time. Advertisements have moved from big billboards to newspapers, newspapers to the radio and television and online to the Internet. As these multiple channels compete for the marketing dollar, each channel needs to prove to the marketer that money spent via these channels helps the marketer to achieve his or her marketing goals.

There are two types of advertisers: Direct Marketers and Brand Marketers. Direct Marketers like to reach consumers directly with an offer of call to action. A call to action can be an offer to buy something at a certain price, sign up for a service or to make a call to the advertiser to get some information. Business dictionaries define the call to actions as, “The portion of an advertisement or marketing effort that requests that a consumer perform a specific action.” (Business Dictionary, 2010) Direct marketing campaigns in the Internet world are executed mainly by using search keyword associated advertisements or by sending e-mails directly to consumers. In contrast to Direct Marketers, Brand Marketers run marketing campaigns to raise awareness of their brand. There is no call to action associated with their advertisements. Their message is to emotionally connect the brand with the consumer. Having the consumer emotionally connected with the brand, it is more likely that the consumer will buy a product provided by that advertiser when there are more than one choices present during any buying decision. Brand marketing campaigns run on prime TV networks and in the Internet world are executed mainly using the display or video advertisements on prime networks such as Yahoo.

As evident from the description above, it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of a direct marketing campaign by measuring the responses to the calls to action. But measuring the effectiveness of a brand campaign using Display Advertising is a difficult problem to solve, because you have to measure the lift in the emotional engagement of the user.

In this chapter we will describe an Advanced Business Intelligence System; we built at Yahoo to measure the Brand Lift driven from the display advertising campaigns on Yahoo network. It helped us to show the advertisers that display advertising is working in lifting brand awareness and brand affinity. This information enables our sale team to drive repeat business and increased spend from our large brand advertises.