New ANA White Paper on Brand-Specific Commercial Rating

By Bill Duggan

ANA has just released the new white paper,“Brand-Specific Commercial Ratings–Benefits and Solution Providers.”                                            

Earlier this year ANA convened the Commercial Ratings Summit, and then a follow-up webinar, to discuss solutions that could help facilitate the availability of brand-specific commercial ratings for television. Those events featured presentations from eight industry suppliers who may offer solutions for brand-specific commercial ratings: comScore, INVIDI Technologies, Kantar Media, Nielsen, PrecisionDemand, Rentrak, Simulmedia, and TRA. The new white paper highlights solutions from these respective companies for brand-specific commercial ratings, including case studies, and helps continue the industry dialogue on this issue.

ANA member interest in brand-specific commercial ratings is high. In a 2011 survey, 82 percent of members surveyed expressed interest in having ratings available for individual commercials.

ANA members and other industry experts have identified numerous benefits for brand-specific commercial ratings.

Better Knowledge/Increased Accountability 

• Commercial ratings would provide more granular data to better inform the decision-making process.
• Marketing mix models could be input with brand-specific commercial metrics rather than averages (which may or may not reflect the delivery for that specific brand) to provide increased accountability.

Better Creative Decisions

• An in-market copy testing tool to identify the stronger and weaker executions within a commercial pool, enabling marketers to pull (or fix) weaker spots and heavy-up on stronger ones, therefore optimizing the creative rotation.
• A real-time barometer of commercial wear-out.
• An indication of a brand’s commercial performance vs competitors, other ads in the program, and other ads in the pod.

Better Media Decisions

• To indicate which networks, dayparts, or programs work best for a brand.
• To optimize the mix of :30s and :15s and help determine the impact of commercial duration.
• To understand the delivery of :15s — because :15s don’t get fair rotations of “A” positions in pods, it’s likely that the delivery of a schedule that is heavy with :15s doesn’t meet the overall C3 delivery.

Branded Entertainment

• To determine the value and ROI of branded entertainment, including in-game features during sports programming.

ANA expects this new white paper to be a resource for members.  And will continue to advocate on the issue of brand-specific commercial ratings and keep our members and the overall industry informed of progress.