Called ‘Intentrack’, the survey claims to assess how various types of brand interaction affect consumer intent.
“It takes us to different ways of measuring and predicting the value of contact management to a client’s business,” said Starcom North Asia CEO Paul Maher (pictured). “The days of saying the correlation is awareness versus TV exposure are over.”
The survey, which began 16 months ago, and polls 11 markets in Asia as part of a wider global study, examines intent by separating it into separate objectives, including attitude change, experience, advocacy and purchase.
The types of media that are measured include traditional advertising, along with word-of-mouth, event sponsorship, retail and review.
Some of the study’s public results make for interesting reading. For example, advertising works most for hotels, growing up milk and digital cameras when it comes to driving intent. For soft drinks and alcohol, advertising is more likely to change attitudes.
However, the study appears to skew more towards examining brand interaction based on type of media, rather than creative content. Starcom Southeast Asia VP of insights and analytics S Ranganathan, however, denies this. “It does take into account creative,” he said.
“It goes beyond traditional ‘creative content of the ad’ and captures the impact of total messaging and contact strategy via the brand interaction scores. It is important to stress that Intentrack is not a diagnostic framework to measure the quality of creative.”
But, countered Y&R regional creative planner Hari Ramanathan,“it doesn’t address issues about advertising content.”
“And this has always been the problem of media agencies. They think impact is independent of content.”
