The “Higgs Boson” of marketing

At the Guardian’s Changing Media Summit today, YouGov Chief Executive Stephan Shakespeare revealed what he regards “as our own version of the Higgs Boson – the trace of a particle that shows there truly is a God of marketeers.”

Working with our panel of respondents, YouGov has discovered a way to measure the effect of advertising that has not been consciously remembered. It is now possible to answer John Wanamaker’s plea of ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’ by moving away from asking people what advertising they claimed to see and focussing in on the pieces we know they were exposed to.

To access the “Optimising media in a changing world” report and find out how we worked with our panel to find this out, click here

Just as the media is changing, so is market research. In this new world, everything is connected meaning we can now draw upon an enormous dataset to better understand the effectiveness of advertising. For example, as well as knowing someone’s age and gender we can now also assess them based on what TV shows they watch and whether they are on social media.

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To show the power of connected data – the Higgs Boson of marketing – we used the Lynx Space Academy campaign as a case study. In January the deodorant brand launched a competition to send 20 people into space as part of the campaign for its Apollo product line. To publicise the competition the campaign undertook activity across TV, online and outdoor media. The study looks across TV and online activity to see how the different interactions change attitudes and behaviours.

Among other things, we showed that respondents who saw the Space Academy TV adverts were on average 49% more likely than the general public to have recently purchased Lynx products, once the other factors had been taken into consideration.

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