iMedia Brand Summit panelists reveal results from an MSN Media Accountability Study, and how they have affected their brands (part 1 of 3).

At September's iMedia Brand Summit, Mediasmith president David Smith led a panel discussion around the findings of an MSN Media Accountability Study. The study, conducted by MSN in conjunction with Rex Briggs of Marketing Evolution, analyzed the online component of ad campaigns conducted by Nestlé's Coffee-Mate and Kraft's Jell-O brands and found that the Web can provide media impact equal to or better than other media effective at branding.

On the panel were Briggs; Carole Walker, director, e-Communications, Advertising & Strategy at Kraft; and Todd Manion, Manager, E-Business & Consumer Relationship Management at Nestle USA. Following is the first third of the transcript, in which Smith presents the topline findings and asks the panelists how they've impacted their brands. You can view the presentation here.

David Smith: What we're going to be talking about, is we all accept that the Web works great for DR and B2B and ecommerce, but what about consumer goods sold through retail? And that's the Holy Grail: being able to provide media and tactics that's equal to or better than media generally accepted, like television and magazines as branding vehicles. Can the Web really do that? And that's what this research is all about.

MSN, who by the way, because they're both a major spender and a major seller, has launched research that makes them one of the major media research spenders in the world, and they've launched a series of studies recently to establish the efficacy of online with mainstream, and the mainstream medium is retail sales. Today's studies have been completed for Nestle and Kraft. Procter and Gamble is in the works with a number of brands, which we should be able to report about in future Summits, and those should be available soon.

This is called the Advertising Accountability Study and basically I'm going to take you through a pretty complex graph here that shows the overall population and then the subset of the population, which is basically people from store scanners. We've got a test group and we've got a control group, and the test group was exposed to, in this case, a Coffee-Mate ad, and the control group gets a Red Cross ad. I hope the Red Cross is doing well this year because they're certainly getting a lot of advertising through all of this research, so I hope it's paying out for them as well as it's paying out for, naturally, Kraft and others.

So there's the Red Cross banner, there's a surrogate alternative. There was a sales measurement as well as a branding study and this is one of the things that's really different here from some of the previous studies that have been done. This is real market data, and that's the importance of this data.

Branding analysis came out of the branding survey sales, sales analysis came out of the sales survey. Sales measurement, campaign details -- I'll give you an example of some of the kinds of creatives that were used. All this creative was tested in advance to make sure that it was right from a communications standpoint. So this wasn't about testing that creative, it was proven tested creative. So what happened?

A sales lift of 10 percent, which is for arguably a very mature brand, for Coffee-Mate. The purchase intent was up three to four points in the top two boxes, brand image was up 5 to 7 percent in the top two boxes, in what would be a healthy brand indicator. So sales and differentiation … this is a very, very interesting slide and the Kraft slide is equally interesting. It reinforces this, too, that while TV remained the most efficient thing that they could use, online definitely came in second from an efficiency standpoint and the payback per media vehicle per dollar spent.

This data, these kinds of data, are put through media mix analysis programs and for those of you who aren't using it, you should look into things like MMA and other companies that do this kind of thing. It's pretty sophisticated stuff and there's a lot of companies in other categories who continue to put a lot of money into things like trade and consumer promotions and they're not as efficient a lot of times as the media, even though it seems efficient from a short-term standpoint because it helps you get distribution and it helps rationalize the whole sales process. So, interesting results here. 

I'm going to share quickly, Jell-O -- these were three-month campaigns, so Jell-O went through their traditional sell way back -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and then the dieting period, the hangover for counting carbs after the Holidays, and so they changed their creative throughout this to be appropriate; and again, an example of a very mature brand, in fact, I noted to Carole Walker as we were talking yesterday, Jell-O was one of the brands used for the seminal studies done in the late '60s. It was a General Foods magazine test to establish that there could be something other than television, in this case magazines, to sell a mature brand, and here again, 35 years later, Jell-O's being used to show how you can sell a mature brand using a medium different than the traditional media mix.

The results for Jell-O were similar, 7.5 percent sales, but quite substantial for a mature brand. And, for brand purchase intent through seven points, they got two boxes, so both in brand and sales differentiation, different data points here. The Web actually -- they looked at it at a frequency of 9.8 and a frequency of seven and for those who haven't seen it, there was research done last March/April period, talking about the waste of frequency that was above a 10. And this reinforces that. At the lower frequency it's more efficient, at the higher frequency it's not quite as efficient but something that should be looked into relative to how much frequency we’re putting against some of our online campaigns.

Television and print did pretty well. Television did not do as well as print in this case, radio, a little bit below the bar, trade and FSI -- a very common kind of thing to use for this kind of category -- performed the least. This is very interesting data from this standpoint. We're going to open it up to the panel -- I've got some questions for the panel that I want to ask.

One of the things I want to talk about at the start is that it's really outstanding that this kind of data is being shared with a group like this and other groups, almost on a real-time basis. Usually this kind of data is kept very, very close but getting proprietary data like this on a real-time basis is something that MSN has done for the industry and there's going to be a lot more studies like this, and we can address that a little bit as we go along.

One of the big issues here and we're going to talk about it, is how did this study impact or permeate your organization? Carole and Todd, you've just gone through a planning, and how did this contribute to the planning process that you went through? Carole?

Carole Walker: The timing of the study and the release of the results couldn't have been better. The results came out around March and of course we started planning about that time. This year, the organization's been very, very much involved in integration; throughout the organization the agencies are working beautifully together. You can almost not tell where Modem and Starcom Media begin because they've really joined forces.

So this information really helped inform our planning process not only from a media perspective but also at the table, and the table's getting very crowded, I have to tell you, because with the huge white elephants and the sacred cows in the room, and then, in addition to that, every single agency partner, every single functional person at Kraft is that involved in the planning process.

So we've just come out of planning and this time of year is my favorite. Budgets are robust and everybody's very optimistic, but I've never been more optimistic in terms of online spending and the brands that are involved.

Smith: What kind of brand categories do you expect to be impacted by this?

Walker: There's no particular category. This study has been taken on as part of all the planning throughout the organization from Oscar Meyer to Jell-O. In fact, the Jell-O group took this information, created their own digital presentation and invited the entire division to that, so it has not affected just one brand, it's the total organization. And because it was MMA, and because it was retailer data, it's been taken seriously.

Smith: Todd?

Todd Manion: Several things. For one, we were at the table for every one of those planning meetings for all of the brands. Not only were we at the planning meetings but we kind of dictated to our leadership that a certain percentage of the budget was dedicated to online. As some of the AOL people and the MSN people know, we're actually spending money next year, which is great for them. The other thing is that we as an organization have an annual marketing summit and that's in two weeks. We actually have an hour slot where we're presenting the detailed findings that we can't present to the group as a whole, to our organization, so it's kind of permeating beyond that.

And as you look at budgets from brands, specifically a brand like Coffee-Mate, they redirected on their own without sending push or force to our traditional agencies saying "this percentage of the budget's going to go to online." And so I think that was really kind of an eye-opening experience for the traditional agency in terms of yes, mediums that we have to start dealing with, finally.

Monday: On what makes this study breakthrough.