Five Keys To Advertising Effectiveness

NCS updated this meta-study in 2023. Check out our latest blog for the most up-to-date information that can guide your marketing strategy.

Take Me To The Latest Insights

NCS and Nielsen are proud to present the most comprehensive analysis of what drives incremental sales—creative, reach, targeting, recency and context—based on nearly 500 studies from 2016 and 2017 and over a decade of experience in linking advertising to sales results: Five Keys To Advertising.

This report evaluates the sales contribution of these five key drivers—and how their roles have changed since the ambitious Project Apollo studies of 2006. It also incorporates a separate study that examines the reach of TV & digital for nearly 900 cross-media campaigns.

Key Takeaways:

• As in 2006, creative quality is the most important factor for driving sales, but most likely due to new breakthroughs in data and technology, media is playing a much larger role than before.
• Less than half of all campaigns are doing a good job of targeting buyers of the brand or category—80% of TV campaigns are On-Buyer Target and 31% of digital campaigns are On-Buyer Target.
• TV ads generally have consistently high-quality creative—as opposed to digital ads, which have a wider range of quality, including both much higher and much lower.
• For large cross-media campaigns, reach still comes primarily from television.
• Understanding consumer purchase cycles and timing advertising closer to purchases can boost sales dramatically

DOWNLOAD THE REPORT