Insights: Brands Should Focus On Quality Audio Creative

While advertisers are often curious about how the length of their audio commercial impacts performance, Tuesday’s Westwood One blog outlines other characteristics that are more significant to pay attention to when optimizing audio creative.

Instead of focusing on spot length, three best practices can be employed to develop effective audio creative:

• The fewer messages, the better the advertising recall: Creative testing giant Millward Brown reports the more messages an ad attempts to communicate, the lower the likelihood of a single message being communicated. Their data shows that the first message in an ad with four messages has only 43% of the recall of an ad with one message.
• Prioritize brand building over sales activation: Sales activation campaigns are the “carbs of advertising,” producing a sugar rush of short-term sales and then a crash. Brand building campaigns are the “protein of advertising.” Of the two types of campaigns, brand building is harder to achieve, requires greater investment, and is more important. The massive number of marketing effectiveness studies analyzed by Les Binet, Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, and Peter Field, Marketing Consultant, reveal that the sales effects of brand building “decay away more slowly…in the long run, brand effects are the main driver of growth.” Binet and Field found that the ideal mix of marketing investments should be 60% brand building and 40% sales activation.
• Focus creative on emotional messaging versus rational: Binet and Field analyses have found that emotional campaigns build brands more strongly regardless of the measure: awareness, commitment, trust, differentiation, fame, or image. Emotional campaigns are far more powerful at building brands. They create emotional bonds and associations. Binet and Field also found emotional-based advertising generates far stronger business results for sales, profit, and share.