Awareness and purchase consideration: IPC’s Ad Track

Ad Track [44] was an innovative, landmark survey which demonstrated that magazine advertising can generate:

(a)  marked increases in advertising awareness, and
(b)  movements in brand purchase consideration.

What Adtrack did

Ad Track was a continuous tracking survey lasting 48 weeks from January to December 1994. IPC Magazines commissioned Millward Brown to conduct 200 interviews per week, or nearly 10,000 interviews in total, among women who had read a magazine in the past year (about 90% of all women). 24 brands advertising in magazines were tracked, and half of these were using television as well. A wide cross-section of product fields were covered.

Two main questions were asked throughout the year:

1. Awareness of advertising in magazines (and television where used), for each brand. Awareness is worth measuring because it is evidence that some level of communication is getting through, but awareness is not sufficient in itself. The actual question for magazines was “Thinking about magazines, have you seen any advertising for .... recently?” If the answer was Yes a follow-up question was “And have you seen .... advertised in magazines during the last few days?”
2. Purchase consideration. The wording was “Which of these would you ever consider buying either for yourself or for others?”

Two of the key innovations of this survey were the introduction of techniques for handling (a) the time-lag in magazine exposures and (b) the over-exposure of some of the magazine advertisement executions.

Magazine exposures do not all occur instantly the issue is published (unlike viewing of TV commercials). Magazine exposures are spread over days, weeks or even months, and this must be taken into account in order to relate ad exposure and advertising effect. In 1990 Millward Brown had conducted a readership survey which established which issue of each magazine had been read, and this allowed an understanding of the way actual exposure to a magazine builds up through time. (This 1990 work is now superceded by the 2004 NRS Readership Accumulation Survey described in section 12.) Telmar developed a computer system called Timeplan which merged this data with National Readership Survey average issue readership data, and modelled the week by week pattern of actual exposures generated by a given magazine campaign.

In previous work Millward Brown had found that repeated exposures to the same print advertisement could gradually diminish in their effect, because with print ads - which can be held and studied for as long as the reader wishes - readers can take out the key messages during the early exposures. The solution is to introduce a new creative execution, thus refreshing the stimulation given to readers. Millward Brown’s modelling of the Ad Track data took account of the extent to which each magazine campaign introduced new creative treatments.

Results for Awareness

The Awareness Index measures the percentage increase in awareness per 100 gross rating points. Averaging across all the campaigns, magazine advertising was creating an awareness score of 13% - exactly the same as the television advertising. So magazine ads are as powerful as TV commercials for getting consumers to give attention and thought to brands. On top of this, the magazine exposures are generated at roughly half the cost of the TV exposures.

To illustrate the data produced on individual campaigns, the next chart shows the build in advertising awareness for Kellogg’s Common Sense Oat Bran Flakes, which used a mixture of weekly and monthly magazines and three different creative treatments. The level of claimed awareness is shown on the scale down the left and the box at the bottom shows the gross rating points over the year. There is a clear uplift in awareness in April and May which was then sustained over the year. The movement is very clear-cut and can be related directly to the magazine campaign. There was no TV in 1994.

Millward Brown’s pithy overall summary of the Kellogg’s Common Sense Oat Bran Flakes campaign was “Successful campaign producing clear and sustained movements in purchase consideration and advertising awareness”.

Results for Purchase Consideration

Second, there is the measurement of consumers who would consider buying the advertised products - ‘purchase consideration’ as this was called.

There were 22 brands where it was possible to isolate the effect of magazines. For 15 of these, there was a measurable increase in purchase consideration. 11 of these were magazine-only campaigns and four were mixed-media campaigns using magazines and TV. Of the seven magazine campaigns showing no movement in purchase consideration, five were already running at quite high levels and were therefore very hard to shift upwards.

Six TV-only campaigns had been tracked, and of these only two showed an increase in purchase consideration - though the four others were already running at quite high levels.

These data prove that magazine campaigns can increase people’s willingness to consider buying products.

As an example of results for an individual brand, the next chart shows the purchase consideration diagram for Candy Electrical Appliances. Candy used women’s weeklies and general and home monthlies, with four creative executions. There was no TV. The graph reveals that as soon as the magazine advertising commenced the percentage of women who would consider buying Candy electrical appliances rose, and the rise continued throughout the campaign.

Millward Brown’s overall summary of the Candy Electrical Appliances campaign was “Operating in a relatively low involvement product field, the campaign successfully increased purchase consideration using consistent executional style across the campaign and sustained support”.

Conclusion

The Ad Track research demonstrated the power of the magazine medium, both in delivering a message about the brand and in influencing purchase decisions. Magazine campaigns can be as successful as TV campaigns - and indeed in some cases can be more effective.

Millward Brown’s conclusion was “The movements in purchase consideration (two thirds of brands showing an increase) and the relative magnitude of the awareness response (on average on a par with TV but at a lower cost) should provide confidence to clients and planners that magazines are a genuinely powerful medium.”