Companies spend millions on advertising and banks are no exception. From attracting new customers to maintaining a brand presence, advertising can be crucial in a firm’s strategy. There only remains one question: Does it actually work? Patrick Brusnahan speaks to Nielsen and examines its effectiveness

When one thinks of Nielsen ratings, the mind usually wanders to television shows and how said ratings hold their futures in the balance. However, it isn’t just the latest Channel 4 drama that the company tracks. Advertisements are also monitored to check their effectiveness.

A service entitled TV Brand Effect (TVBE) runs seven days a week between 6pm to midnight on Channels 4 and 5, ITV and Sky 1.

Christopher Cox, the UK TVBE lead at Nielsen, speaks to RBI about this service. He says: “Any advertising that airs in our coverage period is surveyed to our panel. So it’s pretty comprehensive. Since it launched in 2010, we’ve received about 10 and a half million completed surveys across about 45,000 ads and about 3,500 brands.”

Research carried out by the global information and measurement company focuses not on showing adverts to consumers, but seeing what consumers can recall about them.

Cox explains: “The interesting thing about what we do is that we never show a consumer an ad, we basically are testing on the basis of ‘Can they remember it the next day, based on watching it alongside normal TV?’

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“So we ask a consumer what they watched. If they say they watched the Simpsons, we’ll know that a Lloyds ad was on in a break and we see whether they remember that. We define effectiveness as being able to remember the ad and the brand within the ad. If those two things don’t happen, nothing else will, it’s as simple as that.”

Nielsen gets around 4,000 to 4,500 responses a day split across approximately 100 pieces of advertising. Afterwards, a viewpoint can be reached in close to two weeks. This is then compared to spend data in order to ‘investigate how much these ads are cutting through in the real world environment’. Through this, a better understanding of how wisely banks are spending their advertising budget is reached.

Nielsen ratings 1

Was 2015 a good year for banks’ ads?
Nielsen wanted to get an overview of what sorts of advertising were connecting with audience members. However, there are many variables in the field and it can be easier defined when considering brand value.

Cox says: “We saw a high degree of what we call variants. We have a metric called less impact potential which measures people’s ability to remember the ad and also to correctly attribute the brand. We know across categories that the benchmark norm of less impact potential is around 30% for all advertising. Typically, we see banking hit around the same level with some brands over-performing and some brands under-performing.”

Looking within a brand can reveal unexpected results. For example, if one brand is performing to an average extent, it may not be because all of their content is average; the bank could have the best and the worst advertising campaign, which evens out.

According to Cox, there are a few stand-outs in advertising. He clarifies: “Traditionally within the last few years, I would say FirstDirect has typically been a leader. Their advertising has got a lot of consistency, a really steady look and feel; they follow a formula which often works. It’s been like that for a while now. But there’s a following that’s gone: black and white, weird animal, joke. That kid of consistency works, they don’t have to put as much weight behind it because it locks in quickly and people know what it is over time.

“Some of the other brands tend to do well, for example, we’ve seen Halifax do quite well historically. Again, in 2015, they were up in the top group.

“One brand that changed quite significantly in the last year was Lloyds. We saw real uplift for it primarily due to the return of the black horse imagery which is familiar to consumers and even now, having not has that on screen for however many years, it’s something that people associate with the bank and it’s helped define it as its own thing.”

Lloyds is an interesting case as it had to keep its own brand image after splitting from TSB. Cox continues: “There are implicit brand queues and for a lot of consumers who remember Lloyds before it was Lloyds TSB, when it used the [black horse] imagery all the time. Those are implicit queues to the brand. I think it really helped it in that campaign.”

However, some other banks didn’t fare so well. “Santander slipped a bit, it didn’t cut through in the way it has historically, and it slipped towards the middle of the pack. TSB was weaker as well. The other ones that kind of lagged were the supermarket-type banking operations. They just didn’t get the kind of weight needed. I think they suffer a bit because banking for them is not a priority within the business.”

The importance of advertising
So does advertising work? While it is as ever-present as always, especially on television, the effectiveness of it has been in question as the more cynical millennial generation comes to the fore.

Cox says: “TV is a broad, effective tool for any brand. It’s something you can use to go out and get a wide audience. The challenge is that you don’t get to target in the way that you do through digital and things like that. That’s the trade-off that brands make.

“TV is great at pushing a broad message to a broad audience, but it has to work to cut through and there’s no way of pushing it in front of the consumer you want in a proactive way whereas digital theoretically allows you to do that in a more assertive way.”

With that level of targeting available with internet advertising, surely most of banks’ efforts would go towards that?

“There is an inherent debate in the industry of where budget goes. No one has as much money as they want to have and they have to make tough calls about going down a very targeted digital approach or going down a broad TV approach or is there a way of balancing them both out?

“TV is challenged a lot with regards to ‘am I getting a return on my investment?’ TV is inherently tougher to measure in terms of your return on investment than digital. Digital is much simpler as it is the ad; the eyeballs it went in front of and did it do anything? Whereas TV, because it’s broad, it’s harder to go back and this is why we try to tie it back. TV is not going anywhere, we’re still seeing a lot of spend going to that, and it’s just companies trying to work out how they make TV and digital best fit alongside each other.”

However, younger generations simply have no patience for ads. With countless documentaries, and even serial dramas (such as Mad Men), examining the advertising world, viewers are now more cynical.

On this trend, Cox says: “A trend that we’ve been tracking since 2010 is that amongst younger audiences is a steady slip in terms of ad effectiveness. It’s not vast year-on-year, it’s only a couple of points of effectiveness each year, but it is noticeable. The challenge for everybody is how do I link to those younger consumers who are going to be tomorrow’s big customers and driving that is really important.

“We talk about that millennial group, the buzzword everyone has, but that’s definitely a big challenge as it’s a highly distracted audience that don’t work the way the previous models of activity have done and this is where the challenge lies. They are seeing [ads] on the TV, but they’re distracted by the smartphone. So how do you get an ad in front of them in the right time?”

Review of banking category TV ads Jan/Feb 2016

Throughout Jan and Feb 2016, Nielsen measured adults’ reaction to TV ads from 13 leading banks in three key areas:

  • Ad Memorability: Ability to remember the narrative of an ad;
  • Brand Communication: Amongst those who would remember the ad, those who could correctly identify the advertiser, and
  • Net Impact: Amongst total audience, those remembering ad and brand.

The retail banking category is relatively dense, with a large number of brands advertising heavily for services which can overlap in consumers’ minds. Each year we’ve tracked a significantly larger number of creatives being run amongst these brands, with 25% more creatives on air in 2015 vs. 2014.

Already in January and February, 26 different creatives from different brands have been seen on air, many of which are continuations of campaigns which first ran in 2015, but others are new. Barclays and First Direct have been the most active, with eight creatives between them. Performance so far has been highly varied.

2016 Performance
The strongest brand, overall, so far this year is clearly First Direct, who has traditionally been extremely strong amongst the group. Their advertising typically has a highly recognisable look and feel, ensuring that consumers can pick up on those implicit brand cues.
Halifax and Lloyds have also been strong, with Lloyds doing extremely well on their branding, likely driven by a long running, consistent campaign featuring the ‘black horse’ imagery which is familiar to many consumers.

Typically ads in banking which do well feature:

  • Ownable imagery/themes – Styles which are consistent over time and stand out amongst the competitor set, such as Lloyds’ Black Horse which has been a hallmark of the brand for many years. If a competitor could put their logo on the ad and it still be effective for them it isn’t considered ‘ownable’;
  • Clear, early, frequent branding – Branding can be verbal, visual, implicit or explicit. It should be a core component of the creative however, ideally with both a verbal and visual cue. Nationwide almost always include “At Nationwide…” at the start of a creative, a strong verbal cue;
  • Create a recognisable offer – Within banking there are opportunities to create ads which feature an offer that is structured in a highly recognisable way. Santander’s 1-2-3 campaign is a good example of this, and
  • Novel visuals and music cues – Ensure that the visuals and music are set up to draw attention to the screen, keeping these elements consistent across different ads can also help. First Direct stands out by using black and white images and unique animal mascots to catch attention and implicitly link to the brand.

Amongst the new ads only in 2016, the single most effective one is Barclays’ Fraud Prevention ad ‘Imposter’ featuring ‘David’ with a person behind him revealing all his lines are a scam.

This ad follows several best practices, which have helped it cut through despite a relatively short time on air. The novel look and feel, with a character interacting directly with the audience and a ‘mystery’ voice, the lack of music or any other secondary sound, and the early brand cue all combining to grab and keep viewer attention.

Notes
Demographic: Adults 18+
Time period reviewed: 01/01/10-29/02/16
Surveys conducted 24 hours after exposure in the home.
Brands evaluated: Barclays, First Direct, Halifax, HSBC, Lloyds, TSB, M&S Bank, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander, Tesco Bank, Co-operative, Virgin Money.