New Product Captures Real-Time Mobile Feedback from Natural, Just-Exposed Store Visitors To Deliver Key Metrics for Product Displays, Signage and Endcaps

MFour announces DisplayCheck™, giving researchers validated ad-effectiveness metrics derived from natural, first-party mobile shoppers whose purchase path has naturally exposed them to in-store displays, signage and endcaps.

Powered by the Surveys On The Go^® market research app, DisplayCheck™ fills the need for a trustworthy, reality-based measurement solution for in-store activations. Measured KPIs including lift in advertising, brand and product awareness, favorability, intent to buy and natural purchasing.

“Measuring in-store ad effectiveness in-flight has always been a matter of guesswork, so DisplayCheck™ is another example of MFour identifying a gap in the quality of data and closing it,” said Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s CEO and co-founder. “Our solution is an example of how we’re providing unique combinations of always-on observed behavioral data and Point-of-Emotion^®survey data. MFour is giving advertisers the reliable in-store measurement product they need.”

DisplayCheck™ innovates by tracking all store visits of double opt-in mobile consumers and sending them exit surveys immediately after they’ve left a store where the campaign being measured is underway. Their feedback arrives while the visit is still fresh-in-mind, defending against recall bias that undermines other in-store ad-measurement methods.

Related: market research for understanding retail consumers

Like all MFour products, DisplayCheck™ begins with the largest all-mobile, first-party consumer panel – more than 2.5 million highly-engaged U.S. members who use the standard-setting mobile market research app, Surveys On The Go^®. Completes come in quickly, enabling researchers to recommend in-flight adjustments to a current in-store campaign and lay a foundation for planning future ones.

Researchers who choose DisplayCheck™ can test in up to 1,000 locations, with a typical sample size of 200 each for exposed and control groups. The cost is $20,000 for full-service research and $11,000 for self-service.

The good news for advertising on social media is that a massive audience gathers there. The bad news is that any given social media ad is a small raft of messaging in a limitless ocean of content. To increase your social ads’ chances of being discovered - and lifting consumers’ brand and product awareness and intent to buy - keep reading.

But first, some recent data from Pew Research Center shows how potentially rewarding social media platforms can be for advertisers.

• 73% of U.S. adults use YouTube.
• Among teens, YouTube use rises to 85%.
• 68% of U.S. adults use Facebook.
• Facebook usage is highest among ages 18-29 (81%) and women (74%).
• 50% of U.S. adults visit Facebook at least once a day.
• Instagram’s share of the U.S. adult audience is 35% and Twitter’s is 24%.

That’s a lot of consumers who can potentially be reached by a given ad. The challenge is to turn the potential of social media advertising into a real return on investment. Measuring the effectiveness of social media advertising has been controversial, with concerns about transparency over impressions and other key metrics. But setting aside that debate, there can be no question that brands and agencies control the creative content of their social media ads, and need to know as much as possible as soon as possible about how the ads they’re creating are likely to be viewed and acted upon by their intended social audiences.

MFour offers an advertising research product called Social Ad Testing that raises the chances of success for any social ad campaign. It’s a test that doesn’t seem like a test to the recipients you’re targeting. Instead, Social Ad Testing presents the ad as natural content in target consumers’ actual social news feeds. The test ad is consistent with all the other posts and advertisements the recipients are scrolling through in their feeds. You’re testing in the wild, so to speak - in the natural environment where your ad must flourish or fail once the campaign actually begins.

Social Ad Testing is the only method that takes your ad right into the wilds of social media. All the others do the testing in a simulated social environment. First, you’ll just observe how your test audience responds to the ad. How long was it in view? Did they click on it to activate audio? Did they share it or “like” it?

Next, you’ll step out from behind the curtain and show them the ad, so you can survey them using key qualitative questions about which creative elements work, which don’t, and how favorable they are toward the product and brand. If all signals read “go,” you launch the campaign with confidence. If the ad isn’t ready for prime time, the test will tell you not only that it needs work, but point you to the creative elements you need to improve. With that guidance, you’ll revise and retest until you know the ad is ready to give you your best shot at capturing attention and motivating consumers in the social space.

You can test an ad across different social platforms to see where you should direct your budget. Or you can test different versions, compare, and decide which is the one to use. 

The social ad space is too big and untamed to venture forth unprepared. With Social Ad Testing, you give your campaigns the best chance of breaking through.

Advanced market research technology and the consumer insights it generates are keys to launching successful advertising campaigns, and Chief Marketing Officers who understand how data can inform creativity are driving disproportionately strong results for their companies.

A new report, “The Perfect Union: Unlocking the Next Wave of Growth by Unifying Creativity and Analytics,” bluntly separates marketers into those who eagerly embrace using data analytics to bolster ads’ creative content, and those who are staying on the sidelines. The full story is reported in Campaign, a global marketing and advertising publication.

Conducted by McKinsey and the Association of National Advertisers, the study divides marketers into three groups: “integrators" have learned how to incorporate data in their creative work; "isolators" think data is useful but tend not to weave it into the creative process; and "idlers" are not even exploring the possible interface between data and advertising creative.

"You don’t create exciting things for people by figuring out things from data," commented one of the 200 CMOs who participated in the study.

The report’s authors disagree. "Actually, we believe that’s exactly what data can do. Analytics are what companies have learned about people’s behavior. Such insights can guide and inform where imagination needs to go. In the best cases, they can even inspire."

It's with that cooperative dynamic in mind that MFour has created an easy way to bridge this perceived conflict between data and creative intuition. Social Ad Testing, as it's called, gives CMOs at any stage in their journeys with data analytics a way to present illuminating data to creative teams in a non-threatening way that will validate their best intuitions and guide them when data suggests there's a need to revise a soda media to maximize its impact. Here’s how it works:

• After the creative team develops a digital ad campaign, marketers can inject each ad into the actual social media news feeds of the target groups their brand needs to reach.

• Instead of a simulation, validated, first-party consumers perceive the test ads as regular content amid the usual stream of news and posts they receive from friends, family, and all other sources.

• What do they do? Obtain observed, quantitative data that shows how recipients interact with test ads: opens, shares, likes, and clicks to enable audio.

• What do they think and perceive? Survey test-ad recipients for brand and product recall. Then re-send the ad for their comments, as if they were a mobile focus group.

• Where does the ad belong? Compare results on different social platforms and budget accordingly.

• High marks from consumers will validate the creative team’s concepts and execution, and the campaign can launch with confidence.

• If the test uncovers problems, the marketing and creative departments will see specific areas that need fixes. The data analytics provide a frame for creative efforts to perfect the ad, but the canvas still belongs to the creators.

MFour is delighted to be the newest member of DPAA (Digital Place Based Advertising Association), a global organization that provides leadership for the Digital Out of Home industry, serving as a nexus for information, marketing, and connections and collaborations. 

"MFour…is at the heart of why advertising on digital out-of-home media is growing so rapidly,” said Barry Frey, DPAA President and CEO.

“What we can do is extremely helpful to digital out-of-home advertisers and others in the OOH space,” added Chris St. Hilaire, MFour’s CEO and co-founder. “We are honored to be joining DPAA, and look forward to sharing what we’ve learned with our fellow members.”

To read the DPAA’s full announcement, click here.MFour enables OOH advertisers to observe opted-in consumers’ location journeys in real time, then survey them soon after an ad exposure or after any other relevant experience. To set up a live demo, just get in touch by clicking here.

Should consumer insights professionals take an investment tip from the marketing departments of the brands they serve?

For brands, the smart money increasingly is on reaching consumers on their smartphones, according to a recently-issued report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) on how brands are dividing their digital ad-spend budgets. Here are key comparative figures for mobile vs. desktop ad revenues for 2017:  

• Overall spending: Mobile, $50 billion; Desktop, $38 billion.

• Percentage revenue gain, 2017 over 2016: Mobile, 36%; Desktop, 6%.

• Share of digital ad spend: Mobile, 57%; Desktop, 43%.

• The report also notes that in 2017, video ad spending on mobile rose by a whopping 54%, vaulting mobile ahead of desktop’s share of video ad dollars for the first time.

“Smartphones and tablets have become indispensable tools in the hands of consumers, from the moment they wake up to right before they go to sleep,” Anna Bager, the IAB’s Executive Vice President, Industry Initiatives, said in an announcement of the report. “A double-digit uptick in spend on mobile video is testament to both the pull of mobile and consumers’ never-ending demand for sight, sound, and motion—even while on-the-go.”

In the face of facts and business trends such as these, it seems increasingly incongruous that MFour’s solutions executives report pushback against mobile from a surprising number of consumer insights pros who want to stick with familiar, desktop-centric, online methodology. Among other things, last-gen approaches lose the chance to achieve compelling, location-based consumer understanding by accessing proprietary, smartphone-specific technologies such as GeoIntensity^® and GeoNotification^®. 

For a research industry that’s all about the numbers and how they’re trending, It just doesn’t add up. The boom in mobile advertising shows where the trend is going and where the smart marketing money already is. Unless we’re missing something, mobile is where the smart market researcher needs to be as well. In both consumer insights and consumer marketing, everything depends on being able to reach consumers, and the latest ad spending figures testify to how that’s best accomplished in the Smartphone Era.

For an informative and productive conversation about how you can invest in state-of-the-art, in-app mobile research to meet the engaged, validated, and representative consumers your own projects demand, just get in touch by clicking here.

Will your brand’s social media ads stand a chance when the consumers you need to reach are glued to cute-puppy pictures and Taylor Swift videos?

Watch “Ad Measurement, Attribution and Lift,” the latest installment in MFour’s Expert Event Webinar Series, and you’ll learn how to answer that key consumer insights question with a definite “Yes.”

It’s a brisk, 25-minute look at the most advanced advertising research capabilities, as Vardan Kirakosyan, MFour’s Vice President of Research Solutions, and Senior Research Consultant  Allyson Wehn walk you through new ways to test and measure your ads by first identifying the real consumers you need to study, and then seeing how they respond when they receive the ads in their actual social media news feeds.

You’ll come away with these important insights:

• Why third-party profiling data doesn’t work and needs to be replaced to avoid substituting inferences for actual consumer realities.

• How behavioral location data first validates, then puts you in touch with, the real consumers whose observed interactions and survey feedback will help you avoid creative mistakes and maximize appeal and lift.

• How to inject your ads into these validated consumer groups’ actual social news feeds, to test whether they really are capable of commanding their attention and driving awareness and intent to buy.

“With the tools we have available, advertisers and researchers can become comfortable with change,” Kirakosyan sums up. This webinar is your introduction to those tools. To watch it now, just click here.