Chart of the month: Online brands require more brand advertising to drive growth

This month’s chart is taken from the IPA study ‘Effectiveness in Context’, authored by Les Binet & Peter Field, and demonstrates how important brand advertising is to online advertisers.

Adding some offline/online context to the 60/40 rule, the red and blue bars for offline show an optimum 55/45 split for brand vs. activation, whereas for online brands the optimum split between brand and activation is higher at 74/26.

The online world is a busy place for brands and the nature of consideration in online categories is more likely to be rational than emotional (whereas the reverse is true in offline categories), so brand building and long-term effectiveness are likely to be more difficult to achieve. This has implications for balancing budget between brand and activation for online brands: the optimum balance of brand building to sales activation for online brands is rather higher than for offline brands.

Online brand looking for more insight? Check out our handy Ecommerce nickable charts deck.