Coverage Is King
An Overview of Dr. Nelson-Field’s Benchmark Study
Introduction
At Parsec, we’re proponents of full-page advertising, especially when it comes to branding. Compared to the adjacent ads that sit next to content and attempt to distract you, full page formats balance the needs of brands while respecting consumer expectations of control. Research from Lumen proved how little attention adjacent ads get, but no-one has studied the impact of screen coverage on attention, and resulting impact on sales.
Enter Dr. Karen Nelson-Field and her aptly-named Benchmark study. Through a ‘collector app’ installed on about 2,600 (willing) subjects’ computers and TVs, the study compiled the eye gaze data and attention metrics of both tested and naturally viewed ads. Then applying discrete choice modeling to track the subjects’ purchases on an online store, machine learning was finally used to acquire precise correlations from the sample.
Dr. Nelson-Field’s resounding conclusion was, in her words, “Coverage is king.” Also synonymous with visibility, coverage accounted for over 70% of the variance in sales. Having 3X and 10X the coverage of Youtube and Facebook on desktop, TV outperformed other platforms in every tested KPI.
Findings
Benchmark prioritized Short-Term Advertising Strength, or STAS, as its KPI. STAS measures how sales are impacted by seeing an ad. For example, an ad with a STAS of 110 would mean that someone who saw it is 10% more likely to purchase than someone who didn’t.
Indexed in these terms, TV ads outperformed the other media significantly, measuring in at 144, while Facebook and YouTube (viewed on desktop computers) were at 118 and 116 respectively. This means that TV had more than double the impact of Facebook and YouTube on desktop.
To further investigate the impact of coverage, the researchers ran Benchmark’s methodology on mobile in its second tranche. As expected, full-screen coverage won again, with TV viewed on mobile delivering a far stronger showing than either Facebook or YouTube — stronger even than TV viewed on an actual television set.
While Dr. Nelson-Field’s major emphasis is on coverage, it’s also noteworthy that duration played a critical role elevating STAS. Particularly after the MRC’s 2-second standard, STAS made a measurable leap.
Takeaways
We’ve observed for a while that ads covering less screen real-estate are inferior to full-screen advertising, and now we finally have some hard numbers to prove the impact of coverage on sales outcomes. If Nelson-Field’s discoveries are surprising, it’s only because of how inconvenient they are to major digital platforms.
We believe using 100% coverage can benefit audiences, advertisers and publishers alike. Contact us today to see how the classic format that dominated Benchmark can help deliver better sales outcomes for your brand.
