Move Over, TV Advertising
Major Study Reveals that Online Drives Sales as Effectively as TV Dollars with the New Guys
This is big news for our industry. TV advertising -- formerly the only slam dunk for reaching a large audience and driving sales -- has serious competition, and now the sales-lift data to back it up.
Online advertising grew Consumer Packaged Goods' sales by an average of 9 percent, according to comScore/dunnHumbyUSA's preliminary study results released last month. They analyzed the effectiveness of online ads to drive offline retail sales, and found that the Internet is as effective a driver as TV. (Full details here.)
Breaking news? Well, kind of. Unless you caught the Rex Briggs/Marketing Evolutions study five years ago, which revealed, amongst other things, the same findings after having measured five brands' Internet advertising effectiveness at lifting retail sales. (See top-line results below, or view complete report.)
In July 2008, we at Total Beauty commissioned Insight Express to conduct a study on the effectiveness of advertising on Total Beauty versus competitors. They measured purchase intent and key brand equity attributes delivered by each site, and here's what they found:
Insight Express Ad Effectiveness Study - July 2008
Moral to the story: Not all online properties are created equal when it comes to driving purchase intent. You'll note that only Total Beauty and Allure deliver purchase intent comparable to both major studies listed above. In our most recent poll we asked over 350 women if they purchased a product they saw advertised on TotalBeauty.com and 69.7 percent of them said yes.
So you'd think with all this black-and-white data, that CPG dollars would start to flow online. And you'd be right. In 2008, CPG companies spent 4 to 5 percent of their 2008 US media dollars online. This year? While companies are cutting back on most major TV spending (table below), P&G, General Mills, Del Monte and others have publicly declared online spends are the core of their marketing growth strategies going forward.
- Emrah Kovacoglu, Founder and CEO, Total Beauty Media, Inc.
