Kellogg taps partners for TV insight

Warc, 1 July 2014

NEW YORK: The Kellogg Company, the food manufacturer, is seeking to establish the long-term impact of television advertising by tapping a wide range of partners, from research firms to members of its peer group.

Jeff Doud, director/marketplace analytics at Kellogg, discussed this subject while speaking at the Advertising Research Foundation's recent Audience Measurement 9.0 conference in New York.

"Kellogg currently has three initiatives going on surrounding the long-term impact of television advertising," he told delegates.

"We do a pretty good job – and we think we have a pretty good handle on – measuring the short-term response to TV advertising, but we also know that there's a longer-term impact that we're not currently capturing."

One of these efforts has seen Kellogg ally with researchers at Millward Brown to assess the relationship between advertising creative and long-term base sales.

"We think we'll be able to use this type of information to come up with more strategic thinking," said Doud. (For more, including results from the study with will Millward Brown, read Warc's exclusive report: How Kellogg's is connecting TV creative to sales.)

Another initiative saw the manufacturer of Corn Flakes, Special K and Pop Tarts survey a select group of its fellow brand owners to understand how they are making progress in this area.

"We talked to them and tried to establish what type of strategy they were using for their long-term multipliers [and] were being applied to TV advertising effects within their marketing effectiveness programmes," Doud said.

The third such exercise involved a tie-up with broadcast network CBS and research company Nielsen Catalina Solutions to "use single-source data to try to quantify the long-term impact of TV advertising," said Doud.

Having already made significant headway, Doud asserted that further analysis could usefully expand the organisation's knowledge of this subject.

"We have to delve into brand-by-brand, and vehicle-by-vehicle, to get a true answer," Doud said.

Data sourced from Warc