Study shows significant preference for Unicast’s new video ad format over either TV spots or pop-ups.

Consumers like Unicast’s video commercial format much more than they like TV commercials or pop-ups. That’s the upshot of a study that found only 28 percent of users were annoyed by the Unicast spot format vs. 38 percent who are annoyed by TV spots and 78 percent who hate pop-up ads.

The study, conducted by Dynamic Logic for Unicast, found that the campaigns exceeded Dynamic Logic’s MarketNorms by as much as six to eight times.

“Phase I is essentially preliminary findings that aggregate the results from three -- Pepsi, Honda and Vonage -- of the 10 advertising campaigns testing Unicast’s video format,” says Margaret Hung, director of research services, Dynamic Logic. “The results thus far are positive across all brand metrics, suggesting that these ads achieved strong cut-through and were well-executed, so as not to turn off respondents to the brand.”

Dynamic Logic asked unexposed and exposed groups the same questions on four brand metrics: brand awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. On average, the video commercial campaigns boosted the advertiser’s brand awareness by 54 percent, message association by 144 percent, brand favorability by 40 percent, and purchase intent by 47 percent.

The study of nearly 3,600 respondents also measured overall response to and acceptance of the video commercial format itself.  It found that 28 percent found the video commercial annoying, while 38 percent found TV advertising annoying and 78 percent were annoyed by pop-up ads. Only 11 percent disagreed with the statement that they “felt like they were watching a television commercial.” Only 12 percent disagreed with the statement the “sound made the ad more enjoyable.”

The initial results of the study are promising for the video commercial format, the two companies say.

“We fully expected the results from the study to be positive, but we were particularly excited to see just how large an effect the advertiser campaigns had on lifting key persuasion metrics, such as brand favorability and purchase intent,” says Unicast. “At the end of the day, the most important thing to an advertiser is that they’re able to grow as a brand and move/products/services, and this format allows them to do that.”

However, Hung says it’s difficult to draw any definite conclusions on a sample of three campaigns.  The second phase of the study will look at two other test campaigns -- Warner Brothers and AT&T.

For help with finding and choosing analytics help, visit iMedia’s Web Analytics Connection.