Microsoft ads having mixed effectiveness
The first objective measures of how effective Microsoft’s recent ads have been are now available. The figures are pretty ambiguous, with a distinct split between the effects on younger and older viewers.
The first set of figures involves how many people have actually seen the ads. Bill Veghte of Microsoft is citing half a billion ‘impressions’ on TV and the internet. It looks as if the internet views would be a pretty small proportion of that figure as the official Microsoft version of the first two ads on YouTube have had around 1 to 1.5 million views each. (To put that into perspective, the ads are the 27th and 69th most viewed clips on the site this month.)
Of course, there are other ways to see the clips online, but that’s unlikely to change the fact that most of these ‘impressions’ are coming from TV, which is more a measure of Microsoft’s ad spending than the commercials’ effectiveness.
The other figures doing the rounds involve the effect the ads have of people’s awareness of Microsoft coverage. Several articles have quoted research firm YouGovPolimetrix’s buzz score. That’s an ever-changing number made up of the percentage of people surveyed who have recently heard something positive about the company concerned, minus the figure who’ve heard something negative.
Based on various reports, the Microsoft score was 25 two days before the first clip aired, 12 the day of the clip and 20 the day after, but just 16 last Wednesday (just under two weeks later) and 18 on Friday. That suggests that while the initial ad created a good first impression, the Seinfeld campaign as a whole failed to create a significant boost to the company image.
There’s also a big split on age grounds. Viewers aged 35-49 had a much better initial reaction, while the figure for those aged 18-34 dropped significantly after the first ad, but slowly grew back over the following days. It’s easy to read too much into these figures, but there are some theories that the older viewers included many Seinfeld fans, while the younger viewers didn’t come around to appreciating the ads until they became more widely talked about online.
Backing that theory up are figures from another company, Zeta Interactive, which claim that in the first 12 days of the campaign 63% of online comments were positive. That certainly doesn’t reflect what we at Blorge have seen, though that could be because we spend more time on tech-specialist sites which are more likely to be hostile to Microsoft.
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