.Fox Networks and comScore Unveil Research About Branding Impact of Online Advertising

Last week, .Fox Networks (pronounced “dot-fox”) and comScore unveiled the findings of a ground-breaking U.K. study at the Advertising Research Foundation’s 2010 conference in New York. The study found that video and display advertising are effective at driving significant uplift in site visits and advertiser search queries.

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The ground-breaking study evaluated results from four campaigns 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.

Here are the key findings:

• Video and display advertising both successfully increased brand engagement in each of the four campaigns analyzed. 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.
• 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, behavioral response for those exposed to display climbed steadily as the number of ad impressions increased.

As Vice President Joe Biden would say, “This is a big … deal.”

Americans watched 32.4 billion videos during January 2010, according to comScore Video Metrix. By comparison, Americans conducted 15.2 billion core searches that month, according to comScore qSearch. That’s right, Americans watched more than twice as many videos as they conducted searches.

So, if video advertising drives search queries and site visits, then Biden is right. This is a big … deal!