Speakers including Peter Field, Ben Dudley, Mike Follett, Kate Knight and Kevin Thompson took to the stage at the Ham Yard Hotel for Newsworks’ second annual Effectiveness Summit on 18 July 2017.
With a focus on the three ingredients of an effective ad campaign, Newsworks’ CEO Vanessa Clifford opened the morning’s proceedings, telling delegates that “effectiveness is about more than just one number… there are important components which sit beside ROI – context and influence”.
Focusing on ROI, marketing effectiveness guru Peter Field presented an update of his IPA Databank study. The session revealed that short-termism is driving a declining trend in effectiveness and that the “marketing world desperately need media and metrics to drive long term growth – that’s newsbrands’ real value”.
Havas Media Group’s Ben Dudley followed, giving an insight into how he went about isolating the effectiveness of digital newsbrands from what is often perceived as the “amorphous mass” of online ads. Focusing on two case studies – Westfield and O2 – Dudley highlighted the impact digital newsbrands have on overall campaign performance, as well as their role in driving both immediate results and long-term brand health.
From the importance of ROI to the significance of context in ad campaigns, Vanessa was joined on stage by Group M’s Robin O’Neill to announce the launch of a large-scale project into the value of quality context in ad campaigns. Find out more about the initiative here.
Up next was Lumen’s Mike Follett who demonstrated how site design, number of ads and use of relevant context corresponds with the effectiveness of newsbrands’ print and digital ads, and explains why digital newsbrands deliver 80% more viewable impressions than non-newsbrand sites.
Moving onto newsbrands’ influence, Newsworks’ insight director Denise Turner was joined by Flamingo’s Kate Knight and Tapestry’s Kevin Thompson to debut a new body of research that re-evaluates Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work 50 years on and explores how online mediums have had a transformative impact on news today. Among the findings, Thompson revealed that “news delivered via newsbrands on social media is 1.4 times more trusted than social media content in general”.
