Have You Been Paying Attention to your brand assets?

For more than 10 years, the comedy-hit TV show Have You Been Paying Attention? has provided Australian viewers with a fast and funny look at all things news from the last seven days. The show spins headlines into punchlines, pitting five well-informed, news-watching comedians against one another, testing just how much they've been paying attention in an effort to win the night.

The show has not only been a winner with TV audiences, but it is also in high demand from advertisers, who have leveraged fast and funny moments for their brands via content-integrated TV sponsorships. As we discussed in an earlier paper, integrated content typically outperforms other sponsorship assets (TVCs and billboards) because viewers pay more attention to brands that appear in content than in ads. And for many advertisers, shows like Have You Been Paying Attention? gives them an opportunity to show off their brand assets, at a time when viewers are more engaged.

While lots has been written about the importance of attention in advertising generally, little is known about the role of attention in TV sponsorships specifically. To address this, we set out to understand how attention to brand assets within both content and advertising impacts brand outcomes and what this means for advertisers.

About this study

To examine the impact of attention on brand assets, the Marketing Scientist Group conducted a major study in partnership with Paramount ANZ. This large-scale viewing experiment and quantitative survey exposed 2,200 Australian TV viewers aged 18 – 69 to different advertisements and sponsored programs. These included global TV franchises such as MasterChef Australia and Australian Survivor, as well as the above-mentioned Have You Been Paying Attention?

This is the same research study that we previously wrote about on WARC, but in this paper we report further on the passive eye-tracking data collected to discover the impact of attention / gazes on brand assets. This was done by measuring what the participants looked at on screen, such as logos, products and text, via a camera. We then combined this eye-tracking data with metadata about the assets (e.g. size in pixel/screen coverage) as well as survey data to help explain the impact on viewer response.

Does gazing at brand assets move metrics?

Our first key finding was that when respondents gazed or looked at a variety of different brand assets, they gave higher responses across a range of metrics. In particular, we saw the biggest uplifts in top-of-mind awareness (+37%), the average number of brand associations (+16%), as well as lifts in brand asset fame (+18%).

This demonstrates that gazes at (or paying attention to) brand assets help build memories for a brand in general, as well as boosting memories for the asset in terms of fame. We did not, however, see large increases in uniqueness in this study when an asset was gazed at, which is also considered essential when building a distinctive brand asset.

Increases for fame following asset gazes seemed to increase regardless of the type of brand assets involved, such as product placement or text-based taglines. For example, we saw an uplift in fame of +37% and +77% for two different car brands among participants who gazed at the car products contained in advertisements and content. Similarly, we detected a +21% and +8% uplift in tagline fame for health and QSR brands respectively, when the text of these taglines was shown within advertisements and participants gazed at them.

Does (brand asset) size matter?

Given the link between asset gazes and building memories, it made us wonder whether asset sizes or screen coverage might impact attention and memory. In line with work published by Karen Nelson-Field detailing the importance of screen coverage to advertising attention, we found that asset size and attention were positively correlated, as measured by gaze penetration — the proportion of the sample that gazed at an asset for any time.

We could also look at the same asset for selected brands to understand the impact on attention and memory. The results below look at different logo placements for a well-known health brand, comparing results for medium and large logo versions to a small version of the same logo.

These results suggest that size is important, but it isn’t everything. While there was a stronger correlation between size and attention, we found a weaker correlation between size and top-of-mind awareness. In fact, the gazes at the medium logo outperformed the larger one for awareness, and further analysis revealed that that time-on-screen, location on screen, as well as other factors like context also impacted these results.

Do brand assets within content drive impact for the surrounding advertising?

We also wanted to measure whether brand assets featured in sponsored programs would have any effect on subsequent advertising.

To test this, we exposed participants to a sponsored program that featured a product asset for a well-known QSR brand. We then separated these participants into different groups, showing them either a billboard, a standard TVC (that did not feature the same product asset that appeared in the sponsored program), or a bespoke TVC featuring the brand asset.

We found that viewers were more likely to pay attention (as measured by the gaze tracking) and recognise an advert (as measured with a visual prompt in the survey), regardless of the spot, if they had gazed at the QSR brand assets in content prior to the ad break. Interestingly, the results for the TVC featuring the same brand asset were even higher. This aligns with existing research that highlights the priming / halo effects driven by the content-advertising alignment that comes from sponsorships and product placements.

What this means for advertisers

This research highlights key insights for TV sponsorship:

• Brand assets attention moves memory metrics : when viewers gaze at brand assets, it generates uplift in memory metrics including awareness, brand associations, and fame.

• Brand asset size matters for attention, but other factors matter too : when a brand asset was larger it was more likely for viewers to gaze at it. However, there was a weaker correlation between size and other metrics like awareness, suggesting that other factors are also key for brand outcomes.

• Brand assets in content prime viewers to respond to subsequent advertising : product placement is likely to improve the effectiveness of subsequent advertising, especially if the same brand asset is used in the content and the TVC.

This research advances our knowledge of TV sponsorships - providing further evidence about why they work, and how brand assets within both content and advertising impact brand outcomes. It also shows that when viewers are paying attention to brand assets within TV sponsorships, it’s not just the comedians in Have You Been Paying Attention? that are winners, but advertisers too!

For more information about the SponsorshipFX, please check it out here.

This was originally posted on : https://www.warc.com/content/paywall/article/brand-assets-and-attention-how-advertisers-can-win-with-tv-sponsorships/en-gb/en-GB/154189