VAB STUDY: SOCIAL MEDIA HAS NO CHANCE OF HELPING SMALL BRANDS BREAK THROUGH WITHOUT ADVERTISING ON STREAMING TV

Today’s VAB webinar showed that while social media is popular among advertisers, it is far from a silver bullet. It’s true that it is easy to buy, easy to measure, and allows for quick testing. But there is one major problem: new research shows that its effect on new brands is limited and absolutely insufficient for breakthrough success. However, when streaming TV is added as an additional channel alongside social media, brands achieve significantly greater attention, better recall, and higher purchase intent.

The study Beyond the Scroll: How TV Drives Performance for Emerging Brands, conducted in collaboration with MediaScience, was published by Universal Ads, which is part of Comcast.

Social media is often the first choice for emerging brands

The study was conducted in response to changes in the media landscape and advertiser behaviour. For emerging brands, social media is often the first, and sometimes even the only, medium they invest in, as it allows for a quick start, precise targeting, and relatively easy performance measurement. Television advertising, on the other hand, has long been perceived as a medium primarily suited for large, established brands with substantial budgets.

The authors of the study focused on whether this assumption still holds true in the era of streaming TV. Their main goal was to determine the impact of adding streaming TV advertising to social media campaigns on key metrics for emerging brands, and to find out whether the combination of these two types of advertising boosts performance across the marketing funnel. The results are fairly clear: the combination of streaming ads and social media promotion leads to improvements in several brand metrics. Interestingly, the positive effect of this combination is much stronger for unknown or emerging brands than for well-established ones. This effect can be decisive in determining which brand’s voice cuts through the omnipresent feed noise and which brand sticks in consumers’ minds.

Streaming TV captures significantly more attention

The study’s results reveal a striking gap in attention between ads on social media and streaming TV. While 93% of viewers watched the ad on streaming TV, only 65% did so on social media. The difference is also evident in viewing duration: in the streaming TV environment, people spent an average of 70% of the ad’s runtime watching it, compared to just 42% on social media. Streaming TV, therefore, delivered 43% higher reach in terms of ad exposure and a 67% higher share of time actually spent watching the ad.



This effect is particularly pronounced for emerging brands. The study shows that the increase in attention for new brands on streaming TV is approximately 2.9 times higher than for established ones.

The combination of TV and social media significantly enhances brand recall

According to the study, higher attention levels also translate into significantly better brand recall. Among people who saw a new brand’s ad twice on social media, only 11.7% could recall the brand unaided. When a single exposure was complemented with a streaming TV ad, spontaneous brand recall rose to 32.4%, almost three times higher than a social-media-only campaign.



An even stronger effect was observed with short formats, such as reels or short videos. Exposure on social media alone led to brand recall in only 5.7% of people, while the combination of streaming TV and social video feed increased recall to 28%, representing an approximately fivefold increase. The study also notes that streaming TV enhances overall brand perception. For emerging brands, this effect was about 2.3 times stronger than for established brands.

TV also helps boost purchase intent

The research also examined how different media combinations affect consumers’ willingness to purchase advertised products or services. Increasing the number of social media ad exposures had virtually no impact on purchase intent. However, when a streaming TV ad was added to a social media campaign, the situation changed dramatically. For emerging brands, purchase intent increased by 24% compared to social-media-only campaigns. Among viewers exposed to two streaming TV ads, purchase intent rose by 33%. This effect was not observed to the same extent for established brands.

In short, streaming TV delivers better results throughout the purchase journey

The impact of streaming TV advertising on new brands lies primarily in its ability to influence consumers across the entire sales funnel. People exposed to a combination of streaming TV and social media were nearly three times more likely to recall the brand than those who saw the ad only on social media. They were also more than twice as likely to visit the brand’s website, and their purchase intent increased by almost 25%.

The study clearly demonstrated that advertising for emerging brands on streaming TV does more than raise awareness. It strengthens the entire process from first contact all the way through to the consideration phase of purchase.



 

About the study: The study Beyond the Scroll: How TV Drives Performance for Emerging Brands was published by the advertising platform Universal Ads, part of the Comcast group, in collaboration with MediaScience. The research team worked with 436 respondents, combining testing in both laboratory and home environments. The study focused on 30-second ads in social media and streaming TV settings, with measurements including biometric attention tracking using eye-tracking technology and follow-up surveys. Special emphasis was placed on viewer responses to emerging brands, including completely new or fictional brands created exclusively for the study.

Source: universalads.com