New Study: Creative Ads Matter

Westwood One, America’s largest audio network, and Veritonic, the audio effectiveness platform, are revealing the results of a new study on nominated and award-winning audio creative in today’s blog post. 

The Audio Effectiveness 2018 Report for Creative Excellence Awards, which was released as part of the industry-leading Westwood One ROI Guarantee Audio Insights platform, examined creative from the most prestigious advertising and creative award shows to find out what advertisers can do to leverage sound to drive ROI. 

The core takeaway: there is no doubt that commercial quality increases brand and sales effect, and there are clear moves marketers can make right now to leapfrog their competition.

Highlights from the study include:

• Creative matters: award-winning ads boost purchase intent significantly: The award-winning creative drove purchase intent with much stronger scores. The highest-ranking ad scored a 28 for purchase intent (measured as the difference between a respondent’s intent to buy the product before exposure to the ad, and after). The second and third ranked ads each scored a 26. The average purchase intent score across the Veritonic database is six.
• Female voiceovers are a huge opportunity for advertisers: Compared to ads voiced by men, those that feature a female voice performed better for happiness, authenticity, trustworthiness, and uniqueness. They also scored on par across all other emotional metrics. Very few of the ads tested in the study utilized female voiceovers -- 70% featured male voiceover talent while a woman voiced only 4% of the ads.
• Serious ads generate 75% higher purchase intent than humorous ads: Veritonic found that, compared to humorous ads, serious AM/FM radio commercials had a stronger impact on whether consumers would buy the product. While humorous ads resulted in a 6.2 lift in purchase intent after exposure to the ads, serious ads performed better, yielding a 10.9 uptick.
• Ads with disclaimers are winning creative awards and driving purchase intent: Though it was rare to hear an award-winning ad with a disclaimer, the radio spots that had them were not negatively impacted. Three ads with disclaimers won awards and tested well.
• Music, sonic identities, and jingles are significant drivers of purchase intent: Ads that utilized jingles, sonic identities, or music in some way saw larger increases in purchase intent across the board. Ads with music saw a +146% increase in purchase intent post-exposure versus ads without music.