Research by Peter Field
Analysis of the IPA Effectiveness Awards – a bank of campaigns with proven commercial success – shows that including newsbrands in the media mix improves business performance and boosts the business effectiveness of other media.
The IPA Effectiveness Awards, established in 1980, are the pre-eminent global awards for communications effectiveness, providing compelling evidence that campaigns create measurable financial value for brands.
While newsbrands feature in the media schedules of a large number of individual award-winning cases, until now there was no broader analysis to show how print and online newsbrands work with other media to contribute to overall business success.
Newsworks commissioned the respected effectiveness expert Peter Field to carry out this brand new analysis. He focused on 76 of the most recent published cases from 2012 and 2014, to gain a clear picture of the impact of multi-platform newsbrands in the modern media environment, where digital and social platforms are adequately represented as well as the more established media. Only very large business effects were included as measures of success (previous work by Peter Field along with Les Binet proved a clear statistical link between these and ROI).
The results clearly demonstrate that both print and online newsbrands have a measurable, widespread and long-term impact on campaign business effectiveness:
- Campaigns that use print newsbrands deliver a 36% uplift in very large business effects compared with campaigns that don’t use print newsbrands
- For long-term cases, the business effectiveness of including print newsbrands increases by 62%
- The biggest business effects across the whole sample (+58%) are when BOTH print and digital newsbrands are used in campaigns
- Newsbrands boost the business effectiveness of other media: TV +65%, online display +53%, social media +118%
- Print and digital newsbrands boost all business measures, but are strongest for acquiring new customers, generating very high levels of profitability and having a substantial impact on market share
Business effects cover sales, market share, price sensitivity, loyalty, customer acquisition and profit. The scale of a business effect is assessed by the case study author (in the compulsory questionnaire filled in by all IPA Effectiveness Awards entrants).
