Thinkbox
- Ad awareness drives 17% of brand consideration through direct and indirect effects.
- Easy-to-track metric to become vital upstream KPI.
- Metric gives marketers much needed early visibility of campaign effectiveness.
People simply being aware of advertising is a key early signal that advertising is going to work.
That’s the preliminary finding from a major new study of advertising by Ebiquity, Gain Theory and WPP Media based on YouGov data – commissioned by Thinkbox.
“The Awareness Effect: how ad awareness unlocks everything else”, will be previewed at the IPA Effectiveness Conference on 7 October, with the full study launching in November.
The study used data from YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks brand health metrics, to build a model to examine the effects of ad awareness in the UK. It included 1,478 brands from the YouGov dataset, across over 120 product sectors, and uses data collected between January 2022 and March 2026.
The analysis proposes a generalised framework for brand development, linking ad awareness to consideration, quality perceptions, value for money and corporate reputation. This is a groundbreaking econometric study in terms of its scope, covering most UK advertised brands and proving, in general terms, that ad awareness is a significant leading indicator to other brand outcomes.
The study found that ad awareness is one of the most influential things a marketer can track. It is effectively an early warning system for how brand consideration is likely to change, giving a clear read on future advertising effectiveness.
Why brand consideration?
Brand consideration is the most common brand factor used in applied market mix modelling (MMM) work and long-term ROI estimation. But it changes very slowly, so marketers are unable to use it to quickly optimise campaigns. By contrast, ad awareness is easy to track day-by-day.
The study found that ad awareness drives brand consideration both directly through mental availability and indirectly by building brand perceptions such as value for money, quality, and reputation.
Ad awareness’s average direct impact on brand consideration is 6%. But its indirect impact is even more significant: on average, it is responsible for driving 12% of perceptions of brand quality, 13% of good reputation, and 18% of value for money.
So, combining the direct and indirect effects of ad awareness means it is responsible for driving an average of 17% of brand consideration.
Category variance
The study has found that in some categories ad awareness’s direct and indirect impact on consideration is significantly higher than the average. For example, in the Quick Service Restaurant Delivery category, ad awareness accounts for 69% of brand consideration. In the Lottery category it is responsible for 62%. And in the Ride Hailing sector it is 61%.
Anthony Jones, Thinkbox’s Head of Research: “Ad awareness is a pivotal metric. We’ve been staring downstream at what’s changing slowly and ignoring the influential thing upstream that we can easily see and quickly react to.
“Brand consideration matters but it is too slow to be useful in today’s fast-reaction marketing. Ad awareness offers marketers a vital early read on whether things are working. If marketers re-focus on ad awareness they can transform their visibility of what lies ahead and change accordingly.
“Besides being a practical resource for the industry, this work is also a call to the market to reconsider the value of ad awareness as a leading indicator of success and as a key marketing objective.”
The full study – including analysis of which media drive ad awareness – will be released in November.