Mediaschneider presents project on environmental attractiveness

Successful advertising resonates with target groups - it appeals to people and triggers a certain behavior. Media planning usually focuses on the reach and costs of advertising environments. Whether an advertising environment is perceived as attractive or not often plays hardly any role in practice, partly because there is no usable data. This is why Mediaschneider initiated the Ad-Resonance project.

Andreas Weiss, Chief Strategy Officer at Mediaschneider, explains what the project is all about and what the initial findings are.

How did the Ad-Resonance project come about and who is involved?

Andreas Weiss: Mediaschneider has long been one of the donors of the Media Quality Rating (MQR), which regularly surveys the media quality perception of selected Swiss media brands. However, the MQR does not cover the topic of advertising perception. In addition, the study does not include any psychographic target group characteristics, and social media and video platforms such as Tiktok, Facebook and YouTube are not evaluated either. We therefore launched an in-depth project, which has now resulted in the AdResonance tool (Adreto for short). The Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG and the social and opinion research institute Demoscope were won as partners. The project was managed by Philipp Bachmann and Sonja Heller from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. The project was funded by Innosuisse. Many thanks to everyone involved for their excellent cooperation!

How was the project actually implemented?

For the study, a comprehensive representative survey was conducted in all parts of Switzerland. A total of 3709 people were surveyed, so the sample was relatively large. The study examined 82 media offerings and platforms from all parts of the country, as well as international offerings that are accessible in Switzerland. The list includes traditional Swiss media and offerings as well as international digital platforms such as Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube and Facebook. The various media and platform channels were also taken into account, including printed editions, e-papers, apps, media libraries and linear television.

What exactly can be analyzed with the data and how?

We can now evaluate advertising media not only according to reach, but also according to certain quality aspects. The HSLU has developed the so-called Adreto score for this purpose. The Adreto score takes into account factors such as reach, media quality, usage motives as well as the perception of annoyance and the usefulness of the advertising. It is therefore a key figure that shows how attractive an advertising environment is across all media. We can analyze the data in the Adreto tool, a PowerBI-based dashboard tool that enables interactive analyses in which the data can be filtered according to any combination of relevant characteristics of the respondents (e.g. age, gender, level of education, psychographic type) and media characteristics (e.g. reach, media type, language).

What are the key findings of the study?

In general, quality media such as the NZZ and the NZZ on Sunday and the news formats of the SRG broadcasters performed very well in the Adreto score, meaning that they consistently achieved solid values in terms of the criteria examined - reach, quality, usage motives and advertising perception. The social media platforms examined tend to be lower down in the ranking. While Facebook brings up the rear, Tiktok ranks even higher than renowned media brands such as View, 20 minutes and also YouTube. What is very interesting, however, is that even if advertising is seen as negative or annoying in some cases, it can also be perceived as credible and informative. A positive correlation can be observed between these seemingly contradictory things, across all offerings. One example where this is particularly clear is advertising on YouTube.

What's next for the project?

We are still at the very beginning of the analysis, as we believe the data reveals much more than we can see in the dashboard. We want to get to the bottom of the question of which variables (e.g. psychographics) have an influence on advertising and environmental perception - these findings will help us to take media quality and advertising perception into account even better in media planning. This will require in-depth multivariate data analyses, which we will carry out in the coming weeks and months.