NEW YORK: Advertising campaigns can become more memorable than the product or service they support if the media mix is not balanced correctly, a new study suggests.

According to four University of Antwerp scholars, writing in the 2015–2016 winter edition of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR), "With increasing budgets, campaign recognition benefits from a greater focus on television advertising, while brand interest benefits from a relatively larger share of magazine advertising."

Their study – "Mixed-Media Modeling May Help Optimise Campaign Recognition, Brand Interest: How to Apply the 'Mixture-Amount Modeling' Method to Cross-Platform Effectiveness Measurement" – revealed that increasing the share of the budget spent on TV ads raises campaign recognition but, at the same time, lowers brand interest.

Conversely, a relatively larger proportion of advertising expenditure in magazines has a negative impact on campaign recognition but enhances positive impact on brand interest.

Leonids Aleksandrovs, Peter Goos, Nathalie Dens and Patrick De Pelsmacker relied on "mixture-amount modeling" – a statistical approach used most often in biology, agriculture and food science, but rarely in marketing communications – to measure the impact of advertising efforts and allocation across different media.

They used the tool "to determine optimal cross-media investments to maximise campaign recognition and brand interest based on beauty care data."

Their findings include the observation that "both brand interest and the probability of campaign recognition increase with the number of GRPs used. The positive effect of adding additional GRPs, however, is greater for campaign recognition than for brand interest."

In their analysis of magazine and television data on 34 advertising campaigns for beauty-care brands, the authors sought to maximise desirable outcomes for campaign recognition and brand interest.

"The optimisation of the media mix," they wrote, "is especially important because the optimal allocation of advertising effort across media could boost campaign recognition by up to 33% and can improve brand interest scores by up to 0.19 scale points in the current data set."

Data sourced from the Journal of Advertising Research; additional content by Warc staff