Media Multiplier Study

Research Summary

This study was devised to find out how effective radio advertising can be relative to TV, and to learn more about what kind of radio advertising is more effective: effectiveness was gauged in terms of measuring increases in advertising awareness.

The study tracked perceptions amongst consumers aged 16-44 for seventeen brands advertised in two comparable regions. For each brand, one town had radio advertising while the other did not. TV advertising was the same across both towns.

Millward Brown, who conducted the study across October 1999 to April 2000, model effectiveness in terms of the Awareness Index

Across the seventeen brands:

Therefore radio was, on average, three-fifths as efficient as TV at driving advertising awareness amongst radio listeners.

In terms of price advertising agency Universal McCann, advise that for the TG 16-44 Yrs, TV is around seven times the cost of radio. So, by achieving three fifths of the awareness at one seventh of the cost, the radio campaigns were significantly more cost-efficient than the TV campaigns. Obviously price variance between radio and TV will vary depending on area and audience.
This cost effectiveness advantage means that radio has a multiplier effect when added to a TV schedule. If 10% of a given TV budget is re-deployed onto radio, the efficiency of the campaign in building awareness increases on average by 15%.

Some radio campaigns performed much more strongly than others - indeed the strongest outperformed the TV average.

Radio campaigns with higher scores were characterised by good branding - these were campaigns where consumers were in little doubt which brand was being advertised. Enjoyability was also a characteristic of the better performing campaigns, although this could not overcome weak brand linkage.

Branding and enjoyability appear to be significantly more important factors than spot length or media laydown.
Proprietary branding devices (e.g. jingles, theme music) were strong contributors to the effectiveness of radio advertising, even though they may have originally been established on TV.

Misattribution is an important issue. Consumers may think they have seen a campaign on TV even when it has only run on radio. This has important implications for measuring the effect of radio - most importantly, research samples need to be split into listeners and non-listeners.

More Research Results

Using the findings about the relative efficiency of radio and TV advertising, it is possible to quantify the "media multiplier" effect of adding radio to a TV campaign.

It is a long-established media planning convention to maximise TV campaign effectiveness by taking a portion of the TV budget and re-deploying it in another complementary medium (not necessarily radio). This study allows us to gauge the true effect of applying this favoured technique to radio.

How the calculation works
The original TV-only campaign in the example below had a weight of 267 ratings (or GRPs). Given that the average TV Awareness Index is 5, this gives a total awareness score of 1335 (267 x 5).

The revised campaign shows what happens when 10% of those TV ratings (27) are taken from TV and re-deployed to radio - because of the seven-fold price differential in the test, this amounts to 189 radio GRPs (27 x 7). This is multiplied by the average radio Awareness Index, then Millward Brown also apply a reducing factor of 0.6 to take account of the fact that radio's total reach in the region is 60% of that for TV. Altogether this gives a total awareness score for radio of 340, while the remaining 90% of the TV activity delivers an awareness score of 1200.

Added together, the radio and TV scores (340 and 1200) amount to a total campaign awareness score of 1540 - 15.4% higher than the original 1335 for the TV-only campaign.

This example has been worked out on the basis of a given brand re-deploying 10% of its TV budget to radio, and assumes the same price differential as in the test. The effect for different brands, and under different conditions, will naturally vary - Millward Brown can offer advice on this.