Cadbury Makes Ad Of The Week History

This is an Ad Of The Week with a difference. It’s the first time we’ve featured an ad we tested using Test Your Ad Digital, our latest way of measuring and predicting creative effectiveness which puts audience attention at the heart of digital success.

So congratulations to Cadbury for making a tiny bit of history – and for making a terrific digital ad for Caramilk Ice-Cream.

But how do we know it’s terrific? To answer that, let’s dig in a bit to what TYA Digital is and what we’re measuring here.

According to the IAB, Digital Advertising accounted for almost 75% of UK ad spend in 2022. Test Your Ad Digital is built to predict the effectiveness of digital display ads like this Caramilk Ice-Cream one. The kind of ads people see as they scroll through media platforms like Pinterest, Facebook or TikTok.

If you look at the Caramilk report you’ll see that the familiar Test Your Ad Star Ratings and Spike Ratings are still central. That’s because they predict creative effectiveness, and in effectiveness terms digital ads are like any other ad. They have the potential for long-term brand-building impact (predicted by Star Rating). And they have the potential for short-term sales activation (predicted by Spike Rating).

The Caramilk Ice Cream ad does well on these – 4.8-Star Rating and a good Spike Rating too. It’s an effective, entertaining piece of creative which uses surprise well to showcase the product.

But digital ads are different from other ads and they do need extra effectiveness measures. The difference is the environment digital ads exist in. They’re built for a world of short attention spans and have to fight for every second of attention.

So attention is at the core of Test Your Ad Digital.

Look at the Caramilk report again and you’ll see two new metrics which link attention to effectiveness. The first is Digital Fluency, which replaces Brand Fluency. It’s measuring the same thing – how many people know who the ad is for. But Digital Fluency measures the percentage who recognise the brand after just two seconds.

Why two seconds? That’s the crucial, minimum attention threshold you need to reach for your ad to have a chance of long-term impact. If you can’t get people to pay attention for two seconds, you’re falling at the first hurdle. Either you need to make the brand clear right away or you need to keep that attention for longer. Digital Fluency measures the first of those – how clear is the brand at the start?

For Caramilk, the results are only modest – just shy of 50% of people recognise Cadbury from those first two seconds of ad.

Is that a problem for Cadbury? No. Here’s where the second new measure comes in – Attention Trace. This gives a second by second reading of how many people are paying attention, letting you know where they’re switching off and who’s staying to the end.

From Attention Trace we know that 89% of people watch the whole 10 seconds of ad. The creative is built to hold attention by delaying the product reveal, and it works: this is a really strong score. There’s also no particular drop-off points where Cadbury lose people’s attention.

That 89% Attention Trace is why a low Digital Fluency score doesn’t matter so much. People not recognising the brand after 2 seconds isn’t a problem when you’ve made an ad which keeps people’s attention until the end.

Ultimately this Caramilk Ice Cream spot is a very strong, 4.8-Star digital ad which keeps its audience’s attention extremely well. It’s digitally effective. We know that because we’ve also validated TYA Digital with our friends at Pinterest, and shown that an above average Star rating yields 6 times higher brand lift in action intent. When people feel more, they buy more – digitally or otherwise.