BrandAid: Simplifying Advertising impact analysis

BrandAId is our new software for monitoring cross-media advertising impact. Using artificial intelligence, or ‘AI’, and the associated automation, BrandAId provides insights into cross-media advertising impact across all genres and advertising sales houses. The software uses the latest technologies to analyse complex relationships between brand KPIs and advertising expenditure for over 1,300 brands and forecasts future developments to provide our advertising clients with data-driven decision-making tools. 

BrandAId consequently enables marketing managers to better and more easily understand historical data on a large scale and predict the future development of brand KPIs. When we began developing BrandAId in autumn 2020, we set ourselves the goal of replacing complex, brand-specific analyses of advertising impact with a single user-friendly tool that, thanks to its large pool of data, allows users to analyse over 1,300 brands, not just one specific brand. BrandAId automatically incorporates influences from the market as a whole as well as direct competitors, so we have more than met our goal of simplifying advertising impact analysis.

BrandAId focuses on the most important performance values (brand KPIs) in the brand funnel and conducts comprehensive tracking analyses for more than 1,300 brands in the German advertising market. These analyses show how a brand is perceived by the German population (aged 18 and over) and how this perception evolves over time. BrandAId also takes into account the influence of a brand’s advertising expenditure on how it is perceived by the German population, incorporating TV, print, radio, online, out-of-home, cinema and mailshot formats. BrandAId enables brand-specific, ex-post analyses of advertising impact and uses mathematical modelling running in the background to determine how Ad Alliance and its media types contribute to this impact. AI-based modelling helps to optimise media planning campaigns in terms of their impact contribution.

Cross-media advertising impact analysis is a major talking point and there’s huge demand for simplification and centralisation. BrandAId caters to this demand. BrandAId offers rapid access to daily analyses thanks to its intuitive graphical interface. At the push of a button, each brand can be analysed based on KPIs, namely Ad Awareness, Brand Awareness, Brand Impression, Consideration, First Choice and Recommendation. The entire brand funnel is mapped, providing insight into the performance of current brand KPIs in near real-time. Being able to visualise the advertising impact contribution of each media type for over 1,300 brands in one single tool is a big game changer.

BrandAId uses two types of input data for its AI-based calculations, namely data on brand perception and advertising expenditure. We obtain data on advertising expenditure from Nielsen Media Research, the benchmark for collecting advertising statistics in Germany. Every month, publishers and advertising sales houses in the German media landscape send Nielsen comprehensive data on advertising expenditure in the form of gross advertising spending booked in various media categories. The resulting advertising statistics are independent and based on a market-systematic, uniform collection method that is dynamic and regularly aligned with current market conditions. A three-tier market system (encompassing economic sectors, product groups and product families) categorises advertising expenditure into sectors, comprising advertised motifs, products, product brands, brands, companies, and groups. A hierarchical media system also makes it possible to allocate advertising expenditure on the basis of individual media categories, publishers or advertising sales houses and advertising media.

The data on brand perception (in the form of six core brand KPIs) comes from YouGov. Every day, approximately 2,500 YouGov panel participants are surveyed about brands from a total of 37 sectors. These daily survey data are cross-referenced by gender, age and federal state and are therefore representative of the German population aged 18 and over. BrandAId extensively processes and sophisticatedly incorporates YouGov brand-tracking data, providing easy-to-understand and meaningful insights into what consumers think about your brands, company, and competitors. Brand tracking includes historical data stretching back to January 2017 and is updated daily, allowing BrandAId to showcase how consumer perceptions are changing in near real-time.

As we adopted an agile approach to developing BrandAId, we continuously incorporate customer feedback into the product. We have already given an initial tool demo to more than 80 advertisers and brands and have received a lot of feedback, which we will now take into account when further developing the software. Our customers predominantly valued the intuitive user interface, socio-demographic insights and the ability to select and compare against competitor brands.

In addition to optimising our AI models to enhance calculations of impact contribution for different media types, we are currently working on a forecasting feature that will allow BrandAId users to experience how spending a certain amount on a particular channel at a certain time and for a specific duration would affect the respective KPI for a brand in the future. This could result in the perfect marketing plan.

Of course, we already have ideas for other features in the pipeline too, but these are still a secret.

Karin Immenroth, Chief Data & Analytsics Officer at Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland