How Single-Source data shone a light on TV ad performance for Hasbro’s Nerf

Most companies struggle to understand the effect their TV ad campaigns have on their sales. This is even harder for CPG companies who sell their products through third-party retailers who do not give them the granular data they need to be able to analyse this.

 

CPG brands are therefore not able to connect their media spend, both on TV and online, to sales and justify their advertising budgets. In fact, many CPG brands are unable to say what would happen to their sales if they were to stop all TV advertising.

Filling the data gap  

ViewersLogic’s Single-Source data, which is the measurement of TV and other media exposure, purchase behaviour and location data over time for the same individual can fill this data gap for CPG brands. ViewersLogic gathers its passively collected Single-Source data from the first of its kind consumer panel in the UK.

 

With Single-Source data, ViewersLogic can see how people interact with, and buy, a brand’s products across all websites and retailers and tie them back to media exposure. Using this data we looked at the effectiveness of Hasbro’s Nerf TV ad campaign specifically and found some very interesting results.

 

Total transparency unlocks crucial insights 

Using *Natural A/B testing methodology based on our Single-Source data, we looked at the people who were exposed to a Nerf ad on TV and monitored consumers who visited Nerf product pages on Amazon, Smyths Toys and Tesco.

 

The graph below shows the percentage of exposed and unexposed groups who visited a Nerf-related webpage.

The blue line represents the percentage of unexposed consumers who visited Nerf-related product pages, while the orange line represents the group exposed to TV advertising.

 

We can see that the exposed group had a higher propensity to buy even before the campaign started, which suggests that the targeting was accurate. In fact purchase intent increased much more than the non-exposed group during the campaign period.

 

The increase we see in the unexposed group can be attributed to online advertising, which was not measured as part of this research, and is much smaller than the increase we see in the exposed group.

 

When we initially looked at the data, we couldn’t understand the sharp dive we saw in both groups during the weeks starting on October 11th and October 18th. After some research, we began to understand that Hasbro made the decision to stop all TV advertising activity on October 11th due to the occurence of a sensitive company event. This had an immediate effect on the visits to Nerf-related web pages for both groups.

Understanding the effectiveness of TV advertising on sales

Knowing how effective TV advertising and online campaigns are within changing social and economic environments is critical for CPG companies. Through access to granular analysis on the entire user journey, they can accurately measure and further optimise campaigns to produce better-performing ads.

 

*Natural A/B testing

Single-Source data is unique in that it enables Natural A/B testing. This enables us to check hypotheses immediately by comparing a control group with a test group:

Control Group: Individuals who were not exposed to the ad in questions during the campaign period or in the 2 weeks prior.

Test Group: Individuals who were exposed to the ad in question during the campaign period but not in the two weeks prior.