The Millward Brown South Africa team has been keeping me busy. As one of the presenters on a “road show” designed to highlight Millward Brown’s capabilities in Africa, I visited Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg last week, covering close to 2000 miles in three days. Traveling by air prevented me from taking in much scenery—airports look the same the world over. And I observed another disturbing similarity while in the southernmost country on the African continent. The power of TV advertising has eroded there just as it has everywhere else in the world.
It was a presentation by Charles Foster, managing director of Millward Brown Africa, which really drove this home to me. Charles was presenting on a Millward Brown service unique to South Africa called AdTrack. AdTrack literally tracks every new ad aired in South Africa for six weeks on three measures:
- Brand-linked Ad Awareness
- Ad Noting (essentially the same as proven recall)
- Ad Liking (rated on a scale of 1 to 10)
AdTrack has been Charles’ “baby” for many years and it is clear that he holds it in great affection. His presentation of the newly enhanced AdTrack began with a retrospective which highlighted the many changes which have taken place since the first ad was measured back in 1984. Some key facts:
- An initial burst or flight of TV advertising averaged 160 GRPs in 1984. By 2005, it had grown to 220.
- In 1984, 100 rating points could be gathered with 12 spots. By 2005, it took 67 spots to reach the same level of GRPs.
- Ad clutter has increased. Just over 500 new ads were launched in 1984. By 2005, that number quadrupled, to more than 2000.
- In 1984, the average Ad Noting score was 27 percent. Now it is just 11 percent, a decline of more than 50 percent.
- Over the same time frame, Ad Liking has changed little, moving from an average of 6.7 to 6.8
What do these facts add up to? Clearly, the increase in average ad weight has failed to offset the ratings dilution. Ad Liking scores have changed little—that rules out the possibility that the change in Ad Noting is driven by poorer creative. The culprit is the increasing number of ads and the increased fragmentation of TV viewing.
Of course, this is not an unusual story. Millward Brown has observed the same phenomenon in Spain as the number of advertising supported channels and clutter increased. We also observe an inverse correlation between the degree of ad clutter and average brand-linked memorability across countries: the higher the clutter, the lower the tracked Awareness Index.
The sad truth is that while South Africa may seem very different from North America or Europe, its advertising and media practitioners are facing exactly the same problems as their colleagues elsewhere.
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October 3rd, 2006 at 4:16 am
There is another point emerging here which seems to be global; the ad liking scores are holding steady. In the UK, enjoyability averages have held pretty steady since we started Link testing all those years ago. But when TGI asks people how much they enjoy advertising in general, the figurs have been dropping alarmingly.
So individual ads are still fine, but overall there is a problem…the only way I can make sense of this is to relate it to the sheer amount of advertising people are being exposed to.
October 3rd, 2006 at 7:54 am
I think your hypothesis is entirely right Dom. Particularly in the “developed” advertising markets people feel deluged with a barrage of ads - and the facts support this perception. In the UK the number of commercial messages seen each day has increased from 175 in 1975 to 1300 in 2006. People still engage with individual ads the same way they always did but the sheer volume is overwhelming. You can only remember so much and a message needs to be highly relevant and engaging to stick in peoples’ heads these days.
October 9th, 2006 at 2:14 am
Dom is right to say that the attitudes towards advertising is becoming more negative, but individual advertisements hold their enjoyability.
Some years ago there was a paper in JAR comparing the ‘attitude to advertising’ over time in the UK and USA - declining in both.
I did a similar exercise in SA and found that the attitude to advertising is more negative among English speakers than among Afrikaans than among Black people. This, interestingly, correlates with the length of time that these groups have had access to television. (The JAR paper showed USA more negative than UK).
I believe that the Black attitude to advertising is also more positive because they still use advertising as a source of information (how to live in a First World environment), whilst the more developed the market the more advertising is appreciated for entertainment value (emotion!).
I believe that advertisers need to be aware that they are responsible for maintaining a general favourable attitude to advertising if they want their advertising channel to work in the long term.
The same responsibility rest on those that make their income from measuring advertising.
Can I suggest that MB as the leading advertising measurer commisions a world-wide general study about ‘Attitude to Advertising’, and repeat it every few years?
Nigel: Thank you for a brilliant contribution to our functions! We received a lot of compliments.
October 9th, 2006 at 11:43 am
Thanks for the debut comment Erik.
Your comment about the differences in attitude to advertising depending on familiarity and environment is something that we see in our Link pre-test data. Our colleagues in South Africa also believe that this applies to peoples’ attitudes to brands. It is definitely true that people in the developed Western nations are less brand loyal than those elsewhere in the world. In the West we assume brands have a similar quality and look for the best price. Elsewhere people tend to value brands more as a quality signal (and want to be sure they are spending their money wisely).
Maybe we should combine brands and advertising into the same study?
October 10th, 2006 at 11:08 am
Maybe the following data will add to the discussion.
Last month we’ve asked 250 people from Mexico City their general opinion about TV advertising. Although most Mexicans have a positive perception of TV ads, only 1 out of 4 regard ads as interesting, and around 2 of 5 as original and entertaining. What’s most fascinating is the strong correlation with declared “happiness” of the respondent. If a Mexican respond to the question “Are you happy?” with “Just a bit”, he/she is much more likely to say TV ads are boring, ordinary and weak, than a Mexican that answer “Totally happy”.
This makes me wonder how an optimistic outlook in life influences ad evaluation. What is the impact of a change in “social mood” in ad perception?
October 10th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Nigel, if indeed the power of TV advertising is being significantly diluted by increased clutter and fragmented media, why are we not seeing a significant erosion in the average AI in markets such as the US and UK (where MB has been tracking for 20 years or so)?
If indeed we are seeing significant changes, then that is something that really should be brought to the attention of the advertising research/planning community.
October 11th, 2006 at 1:45 am
We saw this in a strange way in South Africa.
When Apartheid was scrapped as far as residential areas are concerned we got negative results for nearly anything we asked from respondents in the Natal province (a traditionally white area). The effect was so strong that for any Discriminant Analyses this showed up as a major differntiator. (Which really messed up our segmentation work, etc.) Even in Focus Groups you felt you were discussing things with suicidal people - and that the brands and advertisement were the major contributors to their mood.
What really happened was that Natal was the most affected by the changes in law and saw a massive influx of black people on their beaches and holiday areas, which depressed their outlook on anything and everything.
We could not get an advertisement passed in copy-tests in this area during that phase.
You would have expected that the SA black people are the most unhappy with living conditions, etc. yet they love advertising, as I said before.
October 11th, 2006 at 3:48 am
Fascinating! There’s been some of coverage recently of a survey showing declines in how ‘happy’ people are in the UK over the last few decades while ‘quality of living’ has been rising. Maybe we get harder to please as the range of potential sources of utility rise over time - and it gets harder for advertising to engage us as it becomes a much more familiar part of life (familiar to the point of contempt perhaps)?
It reminds me of a quiet afternoon a few years back when we decided to look at what day of the week people were happiest. Taking rating scale data from a large tracker, we cut the results according to the day of the week on which the interview was conducted. Surprise, surprise, Friday was the day with the highest ratings, and Monday the day where people gave the lowest scores.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:19 am
Thanks for the comments everyone. They make fascinating reading.
At a basic level they serve as a reminder to the fact that research findings are not independent of the social and cultural mood at the time of the survey. Good reason to spread interviews across the days of the week, if nothing else.
At another level, they confirm that the response to advertising does vary with brand/marketing familiarity, i.e. advertising is more likely to be seen as a source of information to people in Africa and China but as overload in the US and UK.
And at yet another level, Trevor’s comment suggests what I have always felt, material goods don’t necessarily make you happy. So maybe the more negative reaction to advertising in the West is a function of dissatisfaction with the (over) promises made by marketers that you will feel better if you buy brands X, Y or Z?
Finally, Diamond, I am afraid I do not have a conclusive answer to your question. Since our tracking studies are customized to specific client needs it can be difficult to track national trends over time. Methodological changes, like the shift to online that we discussed a while back, have also had an impact over the last few years.
We do know that average ad awareness was in decline in the US up to 1999. There was a 10% decline in claimed ad awareness measured across a portfolio of 69 brands between 1997 and 1999. The main cause seemed to be that GRP weight had decline 15% over the time frame. The average Awareness Index remained fairly constant.
We do know that the US and Japan have lower Awareness Indices on average than other less cluttered markets (and this has been presented at several industry events). Given that the number of TV channels people watch tends to plateau as the available selection increases it may be that the additional increase in fragmentation over the last few years has had only a marginal effect.
My basic conclusion remains that the power of the average ad remains pretty constant over time but the number of people who are reached by each ad is probably in decline for a given number of GRPs, resulting in lower noting or awareness levels. This effect is probably most noticable in markets where there is a rapid shift in the number of TV channels with advertising, i.e. from one to three, not 80 to 100.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:11 am
Perhaps advances in media planning and targeting are helping to counter declining reach.
October 11th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Good point.