"TV and Magazine Ads More Effective Than Ads on Internet," asserts the headline of a press release announcing new research from McPheters & Company.
It's a mere coincidence that the dateline of this press release is April Fools Day, but it's definitely a foolish assertion.
What the headline should say is "TV and Magazine Ads Are More Effective than Banner Ads." And that's a point that will surprise no one!
The McPheters research, conducted in a lab setting, gave test subjects 30 minutes to watch television, surf the web, or browse a magazine of their choice. The experiment quantified how many ads each person was exposed to, employed eye-tracking to gauge whether the ads were noticed, and then -- after the lab session -- surveyed participants to see how many ads they recalled seeing.
But the online study focused on "Internet banner ads in standard sizes," ignoring the leading form of online advertising, which is Search Engine advertising.
At 45% of the total online advertising pie, search is the single biggest form of online advertising and more than double the spending on banner ads.
The big distinction between search and all these other forms of advertising is that search is the only "pull" medium, the only environment where the audience drives the advertising by request. TV ads, magazine ads and banners are all "push" media -- what Seth Godin disparages as "Interruption Marketing." Paid search ads produce by far the best direct ROI of all these media; search is the quintessential direct-response marketing today. I'd bet the recall of ads seen in response to a search would also demonstrate high recall.
Magazines topped the media in terms of sheer number of ads delivered in the 30 minutes, more than twice the number of ad impressions as TV and more than six times the number of display ads delivered online. But when it came to recall, TV trumped magazines. Online banners trailed behind both offline media.
I don't fault McPheters' research for comparing these three types of "push media." It's a fair comparison, and an interesting one. What I do object to is the headline, which uses that all-inclusive and misleading phrase "Ads on Internet," when it's really talking just about the much-maligned banner.
Other findings:
Though TV doesn't deliver as many ads per half hour as magazines, net recall of TV ads was almost twice that of magazine ads
Magazines had ad recall almost three times that of internet banner ads
Among web users, 63% of banner ads were not even seen. Respondents' eyes passed over 37% of the Internet ads and stopped on about a third
Internet video ads appeared much less frequently than banner ads, and their exposure skewed heavily towards young men. When they did appear, they were twice as likely to be seen as banner ads.
The research was performed in cooperation with Conde Nast and CBS Vision.
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