Compete Illuminates What Consumers Do After Seeing Online Ads

BOSTON – (July 13, 2009) -- Compete, a TNS Media company, today announced a new offering that measures how exposure to online advertising impacts consumers’ online behavior, specifically search queries and interaction with brand, competitor and third-party sites.  Ad Impact promises to drive higher returns from online advertising investments by providing publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies with the missing piece in assessing ad effectiveness: what do people actually do after seeing an ad?  Ad Impact is a strong complement to survey-based branding studies enabling publishers to prove their value to clients and helping advertisers measure the impact of their campaigns more comprehensively.   

“Working with Compete has been extremely valuable in terms of demonstrating the impact a YouTube Homepage ad can have on influencing consumers’ behavior online,” said Michael Rucker, product marketing manager, YouTube and Google. “Dozens of our advertising partners take advantage of this research and we have been impressed with the metrics reported. Knowing that your campaign resulted in an exposed audience being 700% more likely to search for your product is information a savvy marketer needs to know, and Ad Impact has allowed us to provide our clients with these insights."

Ad Impact in Action
Since the beginning of the year, Compete has analyzed more than 75campaigns across multiple industries to demonstrate how ad exposure impacts site visitation and search behaviors.  The empirical results show that online display ads drive an increase in brand search queries for exposed consumers.   In one Entertainment industry example (see table below) Compete assessed the impact of an online campaign for a blockbuster movie and found that consumers exposed to the ad were 705% more likely to visit the movie website than consumers who did not view it.  They were also 85% more likely during the campaign period to search for the movie or its actors than the Control Group.  Movie studios can connect these data insights to box office sales, and use them to identify best practices for future movie launch campaigns.

Ad Impact draws from Compete’s online panel of millions of US consumers, the largest integrated online panel in the industry. Compete’s unique multi-source panel methodology and industry-leading data management practices ensure the panel is unmatched in its depth, quality and integrity. The new offering assesses panelists’ online behavior after ad exposure compared to a control group of consumers who were not exposed to the ad.

The new offering provides behavior-based metrics in three critical categories: site impact (branded site and microsite visitation); search and ecosystem impact (search phrases, social media, rival site and third-party site visitation); and campaign profile information (demographic, impression and frequency reporting). Clients can also request additional customized metrics and use the information from Ad Impact as inputs into cross-media measurement.

Ad Impact delivers new, detailed, and analytical reports that enable clients to: 

• Measure the impact of advertising on relevant consumer behaviors
• Assess performance versus control groups and other segments to understand the benefit of reaching specific audiences
• Benchmark against other campaigns and against competing publishers 
• Gain a more complete view of advertising ROI 
• Establish greater publisher-advertiser trust through accountability and transparency

Understanding how an ad impacts behavior within a target audience has been the missing ingredient in measuring online brand advertising. Until now, neither publishers nor advertisers could fully account for the value of a campaign,” said Stephen DiMarco, chief marketing officer at Compete. “Identifying how exposure creates search activity or deeper brand engagement helps answer the question, ‘what is the value of the 99.9% of advertising that does not get clicked on?’”

With the addition of Ad Impact, Compete now provides advertisers, online publishers and agencies with a complete suite of digital research and online media planning solutions. This comprehensive set of capabilities enables clients to transform a complex universe of digital data into insights that are relevant and actionable.

About Compete
Compete, a unit of TNS Media, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading marketers such as Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Hyundai Motor America, Upromise, Chrysler, and Verizon Wireless rely on Compete's services to create effective online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns.  Compete’s online behavior database—the largest in the industry—makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives.

Compete was founded in 2000 and is located in Boston, MA, with offices throughout the U.S.  For more information about us, please visit http://www.competeinc.com/, or to join the conversation visit http://www.compete.com/.

About TNS media
Established in more than 30 countries, TNS Media explores all the media—print, radio, TV, Internet, social media, cinema and outdoors worldwide, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and offers a full range of insights, analyses and audience measurement services.

TNS Media combines the deepest expertise in the industry to provide media and marketing intelligence including advertising expenditure monitoring, advertising creation monitoring, audience measurement, market influence analytics, online consumer behavior tracking, news monitoring, sports sponsorship evaluation and more.  The TNS Media companies track more than 3 million brands and provide vital market intelligence to 16,000 customers in the world. http://www.tnsmediagroup.com

The Kantar Group
The Kantar Group is one of the world's largest research, insight and consultancy networks. By uniting the diverse talents of more than 20 specialist companies – including the recently-acquired TNS – the group aims to become the pre-eminent provider of compelling and actionable insights for the global business community. Its 26,500 employees work across 80 countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at each and every point of the consumer cycle. The group’s services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies.  The Kantar Group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of WPP Group plc. For further information, please visit http://www.kantargroup.com