Companies crowing about the brilliance of their advertising strategies is hardly news but they are rarely keen to admit that something isn’t working. When it comes to digital advertising, however, there’s a growing willingness to admit that clicks — the metric by which digital tends to be measured and sold — might not count for much.
The National Lottery has revealed that people do not watch more than 2½ seconds of its ads on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. That’s an average figure and it is generous when it comes to Facebook where scrollers hovered on the lottery’s ad for 1.7 seconds before moving on; Twitter scored highest at an average of just 3.2 seconds.
For context, National Lottery digital ads typically run to 10 seconds — so those bored eyeballs represent a lot of wastage. “It is quite humbling to see how little people care about your ads after all the effort that is invested in making them, especially on Facebook in our case,” says Stephen Cleary, social media manager at the National Lottery.
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The findings come from research conducted by Red C using Prof Karen Nelson-Field’s amplified intelligence measurement tool. The Australian academic and founder of the Centre for Amplified Intelligence research consultancy group — whose staff is made up of coders as well as market researchers — has developed “gaze-tracking” tools which measure how much active attention consumers pay to ads and how that attention translates into action.
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The biggest brand advertisers in the world have begun to tailor their spend and strategies accordingly, moving from clicks and views to reach or eyeball gaze
The research into the lottery ads on social is the first of its kind in Ireland in terms of eye-gaze attention, according to Cleary, adding that releasing the findings was intended to contribute to a wider industry conversation into the effectiveness of advertising on social media platforms. “It’s a hot topic,” he says. Such is the industry interest in the research that it has been published by the World Advertising Research Center which provides articles on advertising, marketing, brands and campaigns.
Last year in a paper for the Harvard Business Review, Sinan Aral, author of The Hype Machine, began by stating: “The effectiveness of digital ads is wildly oversold.” He noted that the biggest brand advertisers in the world have begun to tailor their spend and strategies accordingly, moving from clicks and views to reach or eyeball gaze.
In 2018, brand behemoth Unilever cut its digital advertising by nearly 30 per cent with a 3.8 per cent gain in sales growth. The cut was largely achieved by reducing frequency — endless repetition annoys as much as it influences — and segmenting audiences to target new customers who were not seeing its ads at all.
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For the lottery, the findings of the new research have resulted in a rethink in terms of social media spend to find a better balance between reach, frequency and attention. “We decided that we would no longer report on vanity metrics like clicks, likes or shares,” says Cleary.
He has also been looking at the concept of “coverage” where an ad fills a screen, as ads that take up only a part of the screen have been shown to perform considerably worse in terms of attention and recall than those, for example ads on TikTok, that fill the screen.
And understanding that viewers can’t be bothered to stay watching for more than a second or two has also had an impact on creative. Cleary is quick to point out that the issue is with the digital platforms and not the lottery’s creative strategy. “We don’t believe it to be a reflection of the creative, but the reality of the platforms with which we advertise.”
Research across all media into its waterslide visual — that giant slide and oversized swimming ring that first featured in the brand’s advertising in the 2021 campaign and continues in the 2022 campaign — showed that 94 per cent of Irish adults associate it with the National Lottery, even when shown without any logos or taglines. A wildly impressive cut-through for any creative.
An ad seen on a TV screen, the research claims, takes 109 days for it to no longer have impact
And if consumers are likely to spend just a second or two on the ad on social platforms, there is now a case for the brand to rework the creative to ensure the “distinctive brand asset” as Cleary calls it — the slide and inflatable ring — is shown in the first frame with little or no text as viewers spend too little time on the ad to read very much.
“Social may not be the platform that drives memories,” he says but it has its uses in building the brand. The lottery’s social media ads are more likely to be “a gentle reinforcement of our distinctive brand assets”.
The figures in the Red C research are, he says, consistent with similar Amplified Intelligence research into attention on social in other markets and for other brands. “It’s a reality check for social,” he says, noting that the research was “another reminder for us that, as media-investing brand owners, we did not get what we paid for in digital advertising”.
In its own two-year cross-platform benchmark series, Nelson-Field’s company has also conducted research on the impact of TV advertising on the phenomenon of decay — the point at which the impact of an ad wears off. What it found was that Facebook decayed 2½ times as fast as TV and YouTube decayed three times as fast as TV.
An ad seen on a TV screen, the research claims, takes 109 days for it to no longer have impact — bad news for those of us who feel that the lottery ads have been repeated so often on TV this year we are word perfect on its earworm jingle Mr Blue Sky.
