.Fox Networks and comScore Reveal Ground-Breaking Findings About the Branding Impact of Online Advertising

LONDON, March 25 /PRNewswire/ -- .Fox Networks (pronounced "dot-fox"), the leading global online network from Fox International Channels (FIC) and comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today unveiled the findings of a ground-breaking U.K. study. The study, commissioned by online video specialist .Fox, used comScore's single-source panel methodology to confirm that video and display advertising are effective at driving significant uplift in site visitation and advertiser search queries, even in the face of minimal clicks on ads.

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The study evaluated results from four campaigns across four industry sectors and produced the following key findings:

• Video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each of the four campaigns analysed. The average uplift across the campaigns saw site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven over a four week period following exposure to an ad, with consumers three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms in the same time period.
• When evaluating video and display side by side, consumers exposed to video advertising were 28 percent more likely to visit the brand site and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search.  
• Confirming expectations and previous industry understanding, video was able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increases in site visitation and search queries; however, behavioural response for those exposed to display climbed steadily as the number of ad impressions increased.

The results, which were released in full at the Advertising Research Foundation's 2010 conference in New York on Wednesday, are also particularly significant given sharp decreases in online advertising click-through-rates over recent years, with the U.K. being the worst affected of leading global markets.

The study underscores the fact that consumer search behaviour is positively impacted by the presence of display or video advertising -- even in the face of minimal clicks.   In each of the four campaigns, search activity increased significantly when consumers were exposed to these online ad formats, suggesting that the last click on a search ad should not be given 100 percent of the credit in attribution studies.

Commenting on the findings, Hernan Lopez, President of .Fox Networks and COO of FIC said, "This study proves that online display and video advertising drives significant results that are either being ignored by click-through-based metrics, or wrongly attributed to search. We make an open invitation to global advertisers to work with us and comScore in a follow-up to the study, measuring the impact on actual sales."

"As the online industry seeks to increase its share of branding advertising budgets, it's more important than ever to prove the value of display and video ad formats", said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore.  "This research and our recent Whither the Click study for Europe are helping marketers understand that the internet is indeed a powerful branding medium and how vital it is to measure campaign effectiveness using the appropriate behavioural metrics rather than just the click."

Anthony Rhind, Global Co-CEO, Havas Digital, one of the agencies that sponsored the study adds, "This .Fox research is valuable because it looks beyond the usual data used by the industry for media trading.  As opposed to relying on the usual simplistic denominators of click-thru & last event attribution, this research centres on consumer behaviour proxies that are better placed to reflect communication goals, defining success based on a mix of visitation, engagement and search behaviour across a four week period.  By addressing difficult planning considerations such as cross format and multiple touchpoint attribution, this .Fox research better reflects the way Havas Digital believes campaigns must be evaluated if the digital media industry is to continue to grow in terms of significance for major advertisers."

The study was compiled examining four campaigns conducted in 2009 across the Travel, Finance, Government and Utilities sectors. These campaigns utilized various combinations of video and display formats and delivered a total of 300 million impressions to U.K. Internet users.

comScore's panel of over 80,000 U.K. consumers was used to passively track behaviour and understand the impact over time of ad exposure on specific activities linked to campaign effectiveness, namely:

• Advertiser Site Visitation
• Search Term Usage

The studies compared the behaviour of internet users who were exposed to the online campaigns with a control group of comScore panelists who were not exposed. The control group was generated using a sophisticated pair-wise matching process along a number of important demographic and behavioural variables.  The process ensured that control panelists visited websites in the same category where the advertising was delivered but were not exposed to the campaigns. It also paired test panelists with relevant control subjects based on demographics, internet usage, connection speed, and other relevant factors.

The full study was presented by Gian Fulgoni and Hernan Lopez at the annual conference of the Advertising Research Foundation in New York, yesterday, March 24th at 10:30am EDT.

Notes to editors:

About the study

Full study results were presented by Hernan Lopez, President of .Fox Networks and Gian Fulgoni, Chairman and co-founder of comScore at the annual Advertising Research Foundation conference on Wednesday 24th March in New York.

About .Fox Networks

.FOX Networks (pronounced "dot FOX") the online division of FOX International Channels, is one of the largest international ad networks, with 150 employees in 20 countries in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

The network serves +10 billion impressions to +50 million unique users each month and leverages FIC's TV and online teams around the world to facilitate the convergence of TV and online video planning and buying. .Fox Networks is a wholly-owned subsidiary of News Corporation (NYSE: NWS).

www.foxnetworks.com

About comScore

comScore, Inc. (Nasdaq: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital marketing intelligence.

www.comscore.com/companyinfo

SOURCE comScore, Inc.; .Fox Networks