For many companies, advertising is the single biggest area of marketing expenditure. Given this high level of investment, it is critical that organisations invest in research to ensure the advertising communication is effective, ie. getting the right message to the right target audience. Badly-executed advertisements may not simply be ineffective and costly, they may actually damage brand values and equity.

Advertising development is a multi-stage process where research can assist from strategy development through to monitoring market response. The following diagram illustrates the stages involved in advertising development, and briefly outlines the type of research to be undertaken at each phase.

Nielsen helps clients make critical advertising decisions at all stages of the advertising process - from creative development to pre-testing, ongoing tracking to post campaign evaluation. By aligning Nielsen | Winning Brands advertising tracking with our retail market and media expenditure information, we can evaluate the impact of advertising on brand and category growth relative to media spend and weight. By adopting Nielsen | Winning Brands AdTrack, discover whether your advertising is meeting its communication objectives.

For many companies, promotion costs are their biggest single area of expenditure, and understanding the impact and worth of that spend is of critical importance. The scale of promotional spend often means that even marginal gains in efficiency will lead to significant effects on the bottom line. For top line analysis, Nielsen | ScanTrack answers questions such as

• How many promotions did I do?
• How does this compare to the competitors?
• What is the overall sales lift associated with individual promotion points?

For insight into more complex promotional issues, Nielsen has developed a series of modelling and consultancy approaches to help companies understand the impact of activity and develop the optimal promotions strategy. These sophisticated techniques are designed to address questions such as:

• How are different promotion mechanics driving incremental brand volume and profit?
• What is the optimum level of discount to achieve volume/profitability objectives?
• To what extent does display enhance promotion effectiveness?
• Are there key times of the year when promotions are more effective?
• How does the length of promotion influence its effectiveness?
• How much cannibalisation across the portfolio occurs when items are promoted?
• What is the worth of historical promotional activity?

Nielsen promotions models use weekly scanning data to evaluate the impact of different promotional tactics. Other information sources (such as Homescan consumer purchasing information and manufacturer profitability measures) can also be incorporated.

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