Brand advertising online

In 2011 the IAB embarked on a major research series, the Building Brands Online Trilogy. These studies focused on three major FMCG brands owned by Starbucks, Nestle and GSK and aimed to understand the contribution of online advertising to building brand awareness in each case. Full results presentations are available to IAB members and summary booklets – pulling out key results are available to all. The results of all three projects are also summarised in the Building Brands Online Whitepaper which is free to download.

The project explored the way that advertisers are changing the way that they use online – from a medium judged by click-throughs and responses to a medium judged alongside other advertising media by the contribution it makes to raising brand awareness, increasing brand favourability and driving purchase intent. Some of the key findings of the research were that:

• Online offers incremental and exclusive reach to branding campaigns when used alongside other media
• Online advertising worked well to drive brand awareness and to help reposition brands
• The online element of multi-media campaigns helped brands achieve their objectives more cost effectively than other media
• Online worked particularly well at reaching brands’ core target audiences and at getting the brands’ messages across to the target audiences
• Exposure to multiple elements of the campaign – for example online and TV – was most effective at achieving brands’ objectives

As online advertising evolves, the IAB is committed to understanding the increasing effectiveness of brand advertising online whether through new brand friendly display formats, online video advertising or looking at the role of display advertising to build brand awareness in the Customer Conversion Journey.