Summary
This report from the 4As's Transformation annual conference describes the genesis and subsequent iterations of the widely-celebrated series of humorous commercials that have been the advertising hallmark of Geico, the US automotive insurer. The idea for the first commercial, featuring a gecko, stemmed from an incidental sketch in 1999 following focus group findings that many consumers mispronounced the company's name. This has since spawned creative treatments involving characters such as cavemen and pigs. Geico's irreverent approach in a low-interest category has grown its market share from 2% to 12% since the first commercial, prompted competitors to adopt similar creative strategies and led to a big increase in adspend within the automotive insurance sector.

Summary
What is the pay-off to enlisting celebrity endorsers? Although effects on stock returns are relatively well documented, little is known about any impact on sales—arguably a metric of more direct importance to advertising practitioners. This study of athlete endorsements finds there is a positive pay-off to a firm’s decision to sign an endorser, and that endorsements are associated with increasing sales in an absolute sense and relative to competing brands. Furthermore, sales and stock returns jump noticeably with each major achievement by the athlete. However, whereas stock-return effects are relatively constant, sales effects exhibit decreasing returns over time. Implications for practitioners are outlined.

Summary
This paper from dunnhumby and BzzAgent highlights how shopper insights can improve the effectiveness of social marketing programs. The study utilised anonymous household-level shopping data from retailer loyalty cards by inviting shoppers to link their social media profiles to their loyalty card purchase profiles. These consumers received product samples, pass-along offers and other things designed to spread recommendations both online and in person. The study found that advocacy programs that leverage both shopper and social data increase in-store sales of a brand by an average of 8% and the sales lift sustains at around 4% for six months after the end of the program. The authors also recommend that advocacy programs should target consumers based on a combination of shopper data, level of social activity and demographics.

Summary
Two sessions at the 2012 Asian Marketing Effectiveness Festival put many of the assumptions brands and agencies make about marketing communications under the spotlight. Professor Byron Sharp, Director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, used the conference to summarise findings from his book How Brands Grow. He was followed by Charles Wigley, Chairman of BBH Asia, and Rob Campbell, Regional Head of Strategy at Wieden & Kennedy, who between them pulled apart five pieces of muddled thinking that refuse to go away. Conclusions drawn include that marketers are becoming unnecessarily obsessed with participation and brand 'love'; reach is a crucial consideration in buying media; and marketers can often do more harm than good by misunderstanding the real relationship consumers have with their brands.

Summary
This paper describes how dunnhumbyUSA and TRA apply a non-modelled methodology for optimising the mix of TV advertising and in-store marketing. Their approach uses purchase behaviour data from 60m US households and second-by-second measurement of TV viewing habits from more than 2m households. The research quantifies the synergy of the three strongest drivers of positive brand purchase change - pricing, in-store display and television advertising - by focusing on heavily-advertised CPG brands within the toothpaste, yoghurt and cereal categories. The report provides marketers with examples of the types of findings this single-source, household-level methodology can produce. One of the findings was that the simulataneous use of TV advertising, in-store display and a temporary price reduction maximises the positive impact on brand sales, more than 11 times the sales effect of TV advertising alone.

Summary
The aim of this paper is to show how supermarket loyalty card data from a panel of over 1.4 million shoppers can be used to analyse the effect of price promotions in a way which can bring significant advantages to retailers and manufacturers when making promotional decisions. The paper demonstrates the significant advantages that loyalty card data can bring to enhance our understanding of promotions, compared to traditional scanner and panel datasets. Regression analysis is used to compare the effects of different promotional mechanics upon different tiers of product across the fresh beef category in Tesco, using both scanner data and loyalty card data. The results show that using loyalty card data, which enables us to moderate for specific shopper characteristics, produces more statistically significant results and provides a more detailed picture of how promotions influence sales.

Summary
This paper proposes a new model for how advertising works and how it should be measured. It seeks to demonstrate the importance of measuring emotional response to advertising and illustrates the flaws in conventional pre-testing measures of persuasion, cut-through, and message receipt. Drawing on empirical data, it shows how an emotional model of advertising and emotional measurement can lead to greater effectiveness and efficiency and to better planning and decision making.

Summary
Arby's Restaurant Group, the US quick service restaurant (QSR) chain, took up a "Good Mood Food" position: food that would make you feel better. Bob Kraut, svp/marketing and advertising, explained the strategy to the ANA 2012 TV & Everything Video forum, which was needed for a business in trouble. Its goals were to fix the value equation, reclaim taste and rebuild the brand's stature and presence. This was addressed through "needs-based segmentation", which identified QSR consumers as not wanting health food but the food they did eat to be more wholesome than that usually associated with the sector. The campaign connected with watchers and spread online, leading to ArbyCastingCall.com, encouraging users to create their own video promoting Good Mood Food. Social media supported the competition, which generated 1,400 entries. Brand-image attributes and ad awareness all grew, allowing Arby's to reverse a four-year decline to post its highest sales increase in 10 years.

Summary
There was a time when big audiences mattered. As communications have become more finely targeted, interactive and engaging, reach no longer matters, say agencies and clients. But smaller audiences don't offer a big payback, so you need to get them to spend a lot or they must encourage others to do so. Brands can either target some segment of the market and extract as much value from them as possible, although data shows that loyalty strategies rarely work, or they can go for influence by spending money cleverly targeting a few 'opinion leaders' and getting them to influence others for free. However, this strategy will not reliably generate large effects. The optimum strategy remains mass-marketing.

Summary
This paper provides evidence that digital share-of-voice (SOV) is important to brand growth. Specifically, it outlines the statistical analysis that concludes that brands that increase their digital SOV are more likely to grow their market share over time. Other findings include the existence of a correlation between both SOV measures and market share is stronger amongst smaller brands and when a brand's digital SOV exceeds its market share, it is more likely to gain market share next year. The paper also outlines the Kantar Digital Share framework which can be used to measure digital SOV. Specifically, it takes data from eight digital channels in order to calculate the SOV for each, which are then weighted to form a single figure. Lastly, the paper illustrates the implications of the paper's findings for marketers, including a recommendation that digital share should be used as an ongoing monitor of digital activity.