Not all digital is equal

We all instinctively know that not all digital is equal, that there will be a difference in effect depending on where an ad appears. Yet with programmatic buying, digital is often treated as one amorphous mass, with little or no effort made to separate it out into its component parts, particularly when it comes to display.

Not all digital display is the same, even though it’s often thought of and bought as though it is. Programmatic bidding models strip out the context, leading to lower returns and potentially damaging issues around brand health.

While there is now a greater awareness – and consequently action taken – to prevent brands appearing in unsafe environments online, the buying process often doesn’t address the positive benefits of appearing in quality environments online.

These three studies demonstrate that a quality online environment has a positive effect on how people feel about and respond to the advertising they see - driving greater effectiveness for advertisers as a result.

The value of quality

 

A large scale and incredibly ambitious effectiveness study, combining behavioural advertising metrics with brand effectiveness measures to assess how advertising works on quality content sites versus the run of the internet. It is a three-way partnership between Newsworks, all of our national newsbrand stakeholders and GroupM. The results demonstrate that an exposure to advertising in a quality environment drives greater engagement, better brand response and is more cost-effective than the same advertising on the run of the internet.

 

Paying for video attention

 

Lumen and Unruly teamed up to explore the ‘where’ and the ‘who’ of video advertising. Lumen’s work captures the real behavioural uplifts in ad viewing, dwell time and subsequently trust in video content in newsbrand environments (the ‘where’). Unruly builds on this by highlighting the 'quality of the newsbrand audience' (the ‘who’). From increases in brand favourability and relevance through to purchase intent and recommendation, regular newsbrand readers are an engaged and valuable audience for advertisers using video.

 

 

Attention = sales

 

This study shows the clear link between the attention paid to ads appearing on newsbrand sites and sales. Lumen studied British Gas data from Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 at impression level, isolating digital newsbrand elements of the programmatically bought campaigns and revealing uplifts in ad viewing, click rate and conversions.