New research says that ‘half the money spent on advertising is still wasted’

A new report on the effectiveness of multi-media marketing campaigns has shown that over half of the total media investment allocation for many brands has no positive effect.

The study, titled 'The complexity of multi-media effects', found that 55% of the multi-media investment analysed resulted in no increase in sales for the brands studied.

One of the lead researchers, Demetrios Vakratsas from the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Canada, says, "The balance between the amounts a company invests in each medium, be it TV, direct mail, internet or print media, determines to a large extent the effectiveness of a multi-media campaign. A little too much in one medium can mean the whole message becomes saturated and stops having a positive impact."

The report also found that managers can increase the impact of their advertising by forgoing traditional market analysis techniques in favour of newer approaches that have the ability to capture the complexity and diversity of multi-media campaigns.

 "The task of measuring multi-media effects is a challenging one, Vakratsas explains. Determining market response in each advertising medium is a complex process. But it is absolutely central to the success of a campaign. The MARS methodology we followed in this research allowed us to model a large number of media effects and in doing so identify the points where advertising allocations  stopped having the desired effect."

Read full paper in the attached pdf.