How do big companies assess whether their TV ads were useful or not?
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So people have given you some halfway decent answers. I will try and be a little mote comprehensive:
Depending on the advert goal, it is measured in a variety of ways, now perception based ads I will come to later, these arent meant to make you buy anything, but simply change your view of the company.
The rest basically comes down to a metric called ROI (Return on investment)
Now, each platform will have its own way of measuring things, but the most basic overview is this:
For each £/$ i spend on platform X, i recieve Y £/$ back.
Usuqlly this is meaured in decimal integers, 1.7 or 12.5 etc. So a TV advert with 1.7 ROI gives you 0.7 £/$ back for each 1 £$ spent.
Now thats the most basic way. The next thing will be a “diminish returns curve”, so its not actually true that it gives back 1.7x, what it does it give back 1.7x at that amount of spend, in reality it will be a much higher number for the first $ spent, and at some point, the return starts to drop off, giving less and less per dollar spent, most brands tend to hover much lower tgan a total investment.
So lets say TV gives you 10 back for the first dollar, then 9 for the next, then 8 etc.. and radio gives you 6 back for the first dollar, when you go to put that dollar into tv that will give you 5 back, you should actually put it in Radio. And then do this optimisation across all channels.making sure each dollar gives the most return.
Now, you do this across all platforms, TV, Radio, Social etc, and you then do a weighted calculation called your Media Mix, and it all gets condensed down to a single value, ROI (Return on investment).
Now after youve been doing this for a long time, you get a baseline, seasonally adjusted, so you know that most of your adverts give you back lets say 3x. Now if you sont change your media mix and have the same number/amound of advert coverage, but you change your advert, new colours, message, branding etc, you can then use thr baseline to see whether the visual changes you made moved the needle and improved or reduced your ROI.
So thats the top level for adverts meant to “drive some behaviour” whether is be making a purchase or clicking a link.
The perception based adverts are slightly different, you take a survey of peolle (a few thousand), at some point in time, then you take part of that group and make sure they dont see your adverts, and the rest, you expose to different groups of adverts (TV, or TV+Radio rtc) and then, you over a period of time, resurvey them in chunks, first batch immediately after (focus groups) and then the next group a day after, then a werk, then a month etc, and you see if the perception of the brand has changed relative to the group exposed to none of your advertising.
On a more targetted level, there are thousands of measures, , click rate, bouncerate, dwell time on page, skip time, time spent watching video, frequency of exposure, how many people it reached etc. Tbese are all what you would call standard metrics. These are all either attribution based (person saw advert and did a thing, or cohort based, these group/demographic did x or y less than this other demographic)
Then there are A/B tests, where you change one small thing and see how it compares to an unedited version, there is also Eyetracking, brain scans, and all these other methids that are a bit more hands on and invasive. But they are more about colour psychology and attention.
Thats the overall view of it.
The most important thing to understand really though is the marketing funnel, with awareness of the brand at the top and consideration/purchase at the bottom, thats how most of it really works and how marketers tend to think.
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