Challenge

Online consumerism continues to grow exponentially, yet online advertising effectiveness is one of the greatest puzzles facing marketers today. Many ask: What should we be doing?

Yahoo!, industry thought-leaders, set out to crack the nut around the impact of quality content on online ad effectiveness.

Method

Dine Discoveries and Dig Insights partnered in a multi-method discovery approach to map the ebb and flow of online purchasing and ad receptiveness.

To create our hypothesis and identify gaps in understanding, we looked to Big Data through Yahoo!’s own search data and comScore information, selected key industry and academic players for interviews, and engaged in a comprehensive review of the existing literature and academic publications.

Our qualitative research with consumers comprised tasked-based observation and diaries of actual behaviour followed by a deep dive into genre-specific behaviours, needs, and attitudes.

A pretest of the survey was used to arrive at a rigorous quantitative experimental survey design that gathered hard data for analysis from a sizeable sample of online consumers.

We studied a range of content from reputable and less reputable sites like The Globe and Mail, TSN, Yahoo! and Reddit, laced with a select set of advertising to determine if there is a correlation between a high-quality content environment and more-effective advertising.

Discovery

While size matters (a-hem), so does quality content! In fact, relevant, quality content that is believable, well organized, well written and trustworthy, among other things, is what breaks through the maddeningly cluttered online space.

Our study of a range of sites isolated the positive impact that a high-quality environment has on the effectiveness of advertising in general and with the very attractive market maven cohort.

Outcome

With this revelation, and metrics from the study, advertisers can better understand “what they should be doing” to provide more clout in their online advertising.

The insights from this research were shared at Ad Week, at the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) Conference, and The Market Research Event (TMRE), along with a host of media buyers and agency people who are only too happy to pass this information along to their clients as solid reasons to advertise strategically online.