NEW YORK: Marketing researchers are yet to provide measurement standards that fully demonstrate the efficacy of branded content across TV and digital, according to a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Three members of comScore’s leadership team – Gian Fulgoni, its Co-Founder/Chairman Emeritus, Raymond Pettit, its VP/Analytics, and Andrew Lipsman, its SVP/Marketing and Insights – discussed this topic in the latest issue of JAR.

More specifically, they examined “the increasing prominence of branded content in the marketing mix” and how such messaging “creates an imperative around measurement that aligns it with traditional marketing metrics”.

In Measuring the Effectiveness of Branded Content across Television and Digital Platforms: How to Align with Traditional Marketing Metrics While Capturing What Makes Branded Content Unique, the authors observe that metrics are missing that would “capture the value of [branded content’s] uniquely engaging context”.

And that challenge, they continue, presents a variety of daunting hurdles in that branded content varies from one medium to the next.

Its applications, for example, include placements, sponsorship exposure, custom-created content, native ads, and sponsored content. But even within those pockets, history and common practices bring a special set of circumstances.

For instance, “traditional advertorials are interruptive to the print experience and can be seen as misleading readers by offering funded content that masquerades as editorial,” the three measurement experts argued.

“To the extent that branded content broadly gets lumped into this category, it can diminish an emerging form of marketing that eschews many of the trappings of traditional advertorial.”

More recently, the comScore authors continued, “creative brands and agencies actively are exploring digital and social avenues to deliver branding moments in any media content”.

But no matter what the medium, the problem persists: “Relatively few measurement methods are in place today to understand, track, and quantify the effectiveness of branding moments in content.”

The authors added: “Branded content requires unique measurement enablement for television and digital, which each allows instances to be translated into standard metrics such as reach, frequency, and demographics.”

To date, however, they conclude that “it is clear that research at the commercial level has not kept pace in measuring brand integrations”.

Sourced from WARC