Campbell’s soup iAd more successful than TV advertising – Nielsen says

Campbell’s soup iAd were twice as memorable as TV ads according to a Nielsen study on Apple iAds, done in collaboration with Campbell’s soup and Apple.

I also read somewhere else some additional data:

- iAd viewer were more than 4 times more intent in purchasing a Cs

- iAd viewers enjoyed the ad 5 times more than the TV one (whatever it means)

- the ones who clicked, perused the iAd for about 1 minute

Campbell bought 53 million impression, and they obtained a CTR of 1% (not bad for a soup). The first iAd airing costs at least 1mn$, so it makes a CPM of almost 19$ (quite remarkable). 1% CTR means 530,000 Campbell’s soup iAd ‘viewers’, therefore 1,8$ each viewer. Good luck in estimating how many iA viewers actually bought the soup (3%? 5? 10%).  Not sure how it compares with TV advertising, but with the soup retailing around 2/3$, if we only looked at conversions the iAd campaign wouldn’t be consider a success. Of course, you gotta consider brand awareness, recall ratio, repeated purchases etc etc etc. I am sure they have done that –every respectful marketer would do it-, it would just be great to gain access to such metrics. That would allow to come to an informed opinion on the ad real effectiveness.

Now let’s compare Campbell’s soup iAd with sponsored search / search advertising, and let’s take Google. You could say is not apple to apple, more like apple to oranges –iAd more engaging and pervasive vs text, pull vs push, awareness vs interest/conversion etc etc, but for the sake of argument let’s just do it. On Google, a click on ‘soup’ goes at around 0.35$, and they forecast a thousands something a day. Food goes at 0.60$, for 10,000 clicks a day. Say you can get 1 ‘viewer’ on a blended rate of say 0.55$, and you can pull in, say, 15,000 of them per day . If you expand into tails, you will get even better rates. You’ll need around 35days, and just shy of 300,000$ to achieve ‘similar’ results. At 1/3 of the price, or less. Obviously, if you have similar conversion ratios. But then you might (will) have a different brand effect.

On TV is different yet again – being the media focused more on branding than on conversion-.

Is therefore iAd a kind of an ‘ad format in between’?

Obviously, with a cool iAd Campbell might (should) have freshened up its image.

So iAds more ‘effective’ (whatever way they defined effective) than TV ads, but likely less effective (in whatever different way you want to define effective) than search?

Or maybe it’s just that announcing something like this without giving proper background information and actual data at an appropriate level of granularity is not really effective. Or fair. Or the press is an ‘iAd’ itself. Or… whatever.

You just can’t get to a meaningful and useful conclusion with these limited data. iAd surely have advantages over other ad formats, and I am sure iAds are great at doing particularly well things that other format are not good at, and they will most likely have a space in some marketing budgets. What, how and why just doesn’t come out from the press release, and at 1mn$ price tag, experimentation is quite expensive.