A new study has shown that advertisements on news platforms — including newspapers and magazines — are more effective in comparison to those on digital spaces like Facebook or YouTube.
Summary of the findings
Ads in printed newspapers perform better than all types of ads placed on Facebook by up to four times.
Ads in news media (newspapers, magazines, and digital news websites) offer a superior level of unprompted recall.
Combined news formats are twice as effective as combined Facebook formats.
Advertising across the combination of news in print and digital is twice as effective as Facebook display and video for unprompted recall.
Ads in news are as good as (or better than) ads on YouTube.
Ads in news deliver 1.7 times the unprompted recall of six-second YouTube ads and are on par with 15 second YouTube ads, whether on desktop or mobile.
News (print and digital) offers a stronger Return on Investment (ROI) than social media.
According to a report published in gxpress.com, the cross-media advertising effectiveness research was conducted in Australia as part of The Benchmark Series and was commissioned by ThinkNewsBrands. It was overseen by Dr Duane Varan, CEO of the audience research lab, MediaScience.
Per the report, the study included more than 5,350 participants, while it ran across 42 print runs and 252 websites. In total, the study created 6,037 unique brand exposures.
“The study set out to understand the impact news platforms have along the path to purchase, by measuring key metrics across short and long-term memory as well as brand lift,” the article read. In the first part of the study, a comparison was held to show the effectiveness of “advertising in news” against “non-premium run of the internet sites,” including TechRadar, the Daily Mail, Yahoo, Mamamia and Buzzfeed.
“The results fill an important void in understanding the larger media landscape,” said Dr Varan said.
The study further showed that advertisements, such as quarter, half, and full pages in print, perform better than ads placed on Facebook by up to four times.
Moreover, the study showed that combined Facebook formats turned out to be less effective than combined news formats, while ads placed across news platforms — both print and digital — proved to be twice as effective as Facebook display and video for unprompted recall.
Furthermore, advertisements that appeared in the news media performed better than those appearing on YouTube.
Per the study, “ads in news media delivered 1.7 times the unprompted recall of six-second YouTube ads and were on par with 15-second YouTube ads.”
Meanwhile, ads placed on news media also offered a greater return on media investment as compared to ads placed on social media, another research carried out by GroupM Australia and global marketing effectiveness consultancy Gain Theory showed.