Research Designed for the Decisions Advertisers Make

By Heather O’Shea, Alter Agents

Advertisers have more choices than ever when deciding where to invest their media budgets. Standard KPIs such as reach and frequency, cost pers, website visits and engagement metrics provide part of the picture. Advertisers also want to understand how to truly capture attention, communicate with people while they are in the right mindset, and deliver the right message to people at the right place and the right time.

Publishers and platforms have an opportunity to answer some of these questions through thoughtfully designed research. The work can help advertisers understand how a particular format affects behavior, how different types of content work together or what exposure to an ad experience means for a brand. Those questions tend to require a deep understanding of consumer behavior, media consumption and cultural shifts that inform smart advertising decision-making.

Research built around the advertiser

In a study with Snap Inc. and Tinuiti, we explored how augmented reality (AR) influences consumer behavior. The project combined qualitative ethnographies, a coding meta-analysis of 741 branded AR lenses and a survey of more than 5,000 social media users globally.

Understanding augmented reality-driven word of mouth meant looking at what people did with an experience after encountering it. Did they share it? Did it lead them to discover a product? How did those behaviors connect with purchase intent? Looking across the different phases of the research allowed Snap to give advertisers guidance for using AR in their ad campaigns, including findings specific to different product categories.

Upworthy wanted to understand something quite different: the effect of uplifting content in a digital media environment where people also encounter plenty of negative material. We used ad exposure via experimental design, consumer sentiment analysis and behavioral tracking to examine how people responded to the content and what that response meant for engagement, advocacy and purchase behavior.

The advertiser story emerged from those connections. Upworthy could show brands what happened when people encountered positive storytelling compared to traditional advertising and how consumer sentiment towards positive content carried over to the brands associated with that content.

Our research with TikTok focused less on a single type of content and more on what happens when different types appear together. An in-context experiment with 2,400 TikTok users tested combinations of brand-led, creator-led and organic content and measured their effect on brand metrics across countries and verticals.

That reflects a decision advertisers actually have to make. A brand planning for TikTok is rarely choosing just one source of content. Its own posts, creator partnerships and organic activity exist alongside one another, so understanding the mix gives advertisers information they can use when deciding how to build their presence on the platform.

Designing for the question

Media research can involve experimental design, behavioral tracking, ethnography, advanced analytics or several methods within the same study. Choosing among them requires an understanding of the behavior being studied as well as how media is planned and bought.

The Snap work needed to follow AR experiences into sharing, discovery and purchase consideration. The TikTok study needed to recreate combinations of content rather than isolate a single exposure. With Upworthy, experimental controls helped separate the effects of the content being tested. Starting with a standard methodology and fitting the question into it would have missed some of what each platform needed to know.

Researchers also need to understand what advertisers will do with the findings. Media buyers make decisions about audiences, formats, creative, budgets and channels, and research has to get specific enough to inform those choices. A statistically sound finding may still have limited use if a buyer cannot connect it to a planning decision.

Platform-funded research brings another consideration. Advertisers know the platform has a stake in the outcome, which puts more weight on the study design, the questions being asked and the credibility of the findings. Sometimes the result that earns attention is an unexpected one, or a finding that adds conditions to what the platform originally hoped to demonstrate. Those details make the research more useful when an advertiser starts applying it to an actual campaign.

The conversation with advertisers can then get quite specific: which content mix to use, where nascent ad formats fit, whether the surrounding content changes a brand response and what the findings look like within a particular category. Those are the kinds of questions media teams are bringing into planning meetings and asking thoughtfully designed research to help answer.

About the Author:

Heather O’Shea is a passionate insights leader with nearly 20 years of experience in market research and consumer insights. She has held positions at media agencies, publishers, tech platforms and research companies. She is currently the Chief Research Officer of Alter Agents, where she oversees the research functions within the company.  Prior to this, she was the head of global ad research & insights at Snap. www.alteragents.com