Today’s online advertising dilemma: the majority of paid media doesn’t deliver enough impact and earned media doesn’t offer enough reach. An effective strategy to resolve this issue is to integrate earned content into paid media. This is the conclusion of a recent research report by Facebook and Nielsen, which studied 800,000 Facebook users and 125 advertising campaigns from 70 brands.
The findings of this research reveal that hybrid campaigns deliver more value than solely paid or even solely earned social media campaigns. You can read a summary of the report here, and download the full report here. Here’s a summary of how it works in the context of Sprout’s experience.
There are three kinds of media
- Paid media, consists of paid ad placements that are served alongside a publishers content. Nielsen’s research shows that although these paid ads offer the greatest reach, they have a significantly lower impact than earned media.
- Earned media, consists of unpaid placements that were generated by users and can sit alongside publishers’ content or user generated content. Although reach is limited by the number of brand advocates, earned media does offer high impact.
- Hybrid media, what the study refers to as ‘social advocacy’, consists of paid media that integrates earned content. Many of Sprout’s clients leverage our platform to deliver these kinds of units.
Paid Media Meets Earned Media
More fans, better Hybrid Engage Ads
Another interesting finding from the Nielsen study is the fact that having more fans leads to greater impact for hybrid media ads, simply because there are more viewers willing to share the brands’ message in their stream. This fact is illustrated in the graph below that displays the relationship between the percentage of viewers of an ad campaign who are fans of the advertised brand, and the total percentage of in-stream sharing by all viewers as a result of exposure. As you can see, the higher the percentage of fans in the exposed group, the higher the probability that the ad generates earned media. In other words, the effectiveness of hybrid media ads increases when a brand has more fans to target.
This graph also tells us that the extent to which hybrid media ads are more effective than paid media ads depends on the size of a brand’s fan base. From our experience, however, this is not the only factor that will determine the effectiveness of hybrid ads. Other questions to consider include:
- Does your brand have a critical mass of fans to support a hybrid campaign?
- What is the desired reach of your campaign and how relevant is the earned content across the reach of your buy?
- How specific is your campaign target and are they inside/outside social networks like Facebook?
- How does earned media integrate into your creative?
At Sprout we help guide our clients through these kinds of questions to develop a strategy to get the most value from their ad spend. We think we’re uniquely situated to help clients improve the way they integrate paid and earned media because our platform allows us to create ads and apps that work together. For example, our Alice In Wonderland Facebook Connect application that is embedded inside Facebook, and on the movie website, is able to share user generated content with the ad 300 x 250 ad unit for the campaign. We believe that this is the future of the online display industry and look forward to sharing our latest projects here on the blog.
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