In 2009, the Willis Group purchased the naming rights to the tallest building in Chicago, which had stood since 1970 and had, at one point, been the tallest building in the world. Fifteen years later, in 2024, most Chicago locals agree: it’s still the “Sears Tower” as far as they’re concerned.
That’s how powerful branding is. There are only 11 Sears stores left in the world as of this article, but even with the company an echo of its former self, the strength of its brand name persists in the public imagination.
Cultivating a strong brand identity takes time, effort, and the ability to measure your progress as you go. That’s where things can get tricky — but at COOL Media, we specialize in measuring brand lift, particularly on CTV/OTT campaigns.
In this blog post, we talk about brand lift: what is brand lift? How do you measure brand lift? And how does brand lift work on Connected TV campaigns? Read on:
Table of contents
Case Study: How Cool Media provided an in-depth brand analysis revealing a 21% ad recall rate for Suzuki. Read More
What is Brand Lift?
Traditionally, metrics in an advertising campaign are focused on lower-funnel activity: the issue at hand is usually driving conversions. So most campaigns are judged by their effectiveness at achieving that specific, limited goal. By and large, that’s all fine and good; ads should be driving revenue. But the more brand trust and recognition you can build up with your target audience, the less difficult it will be to drive conversions in the future because you won’t be starting from square one.
Brand lift measures how building your brand is going — specifically, it measures the increase in consumer awareness, perception, or intent that comes from your ads. Unlike traditional metrics like clicks, impressions, or conversions, brand lift focuses on changes in consumer behavior or perception that you can connect to your ads. Essentially it’s a measurement of your entire funnel, to get a better picture of where your campaign and your band are at.
Brand Lift Metrics
“Measuring brand lift” is somewhat of a vague term. If someone asked you to “measure water,” what would you measure? Volume? Clarity? Temperature? Those are all valid ways of measuring water, and there’s more than one way to measure the effect ads are having on your brand.
Knowledge Metrics measure whether or not consumers know about your brand. This measures things like whether an ad made consumers more likely to remember your brand later. For example: every year, people talk about their favorite Super Bowl ads, but a common problem is viewers remembering the ad but not what that ad was for. That’s a very expensive way to find out your ad didn’t affect brand awareness.
Measuring how many consumers remember or recognize your brand after viewing your ad, over a specific amount of time, can gauge some of the impact the ad is having on brand recognition. One limitation of that metric by itself is that consumers can also become more aware of a brand they hate. Awareness metrics, by themselves, can’t measure the difference between good and bad attention.
Preference Metrics, on the other hand, measure how favorable your brand is in the eyes of the consumer. Customers advance (hopefully) up through various stages of preference towards your brand, starting from baseline awareness your brand exists up to being a strongly loyal, recurring customer. Building up your brand is building equity that translates into customer loyalty.
So rather than simply measuring an increase in awareness, preference metrics track your customer’s positive journey with your brand, which ultimately turns into things like purchase decisions and greater revenue.
Action Metrics are, essentially, the actual actions the consumer takes as a result of exposure to your campaigns — are they purchasing more? Downloading your app? Visiting your website? While other metrics can be more nebulous, an increase in consumer behavior toward your brand provides a tangible confirmation of the other metrics you’re generating.
How to Measure Brand Lift
Like measuring anything else on the Internet, measuring brand lift can take many different forms. But unlike other forms of measurement, brand lift can’t be tabulated simply by placing a pixel on a website — you have to get a little more hands-on.
One of the most-common methods of measuring brand lift is through a survey-based approach. Conducting a brand-sentiment survey is a form of market research that involves asking consumers questions about their associations, thoughts, and feelings they have about your brand. These surveys can be conducted by your own company, but typically this role is outsourced to another firm that specializes in this type of analysis.
Another method is assembling a consumer panel from a mixture of demographics and polling them directly, running A/B tests to compare responses among viewers who saw your ad compared to viewers who didn’t.
At COOL Media, our approach is panel-based surveys, used to measure a campaign’s effectiveness in achieving the brand’s KPIs. We include a minimum of 400 respondents as standard on any given campaign — this large sample size allows us to provide statistical relevance across our studies.
Challenges and Considerations
All that makes it sound incredibly easy, but there’s more to brand-lift studies than simply gathering together 400 people and asking them what they think of your brand. Effectively measuring brand lift across multiple devices and platforms requires robust data integration and sophisticated attribution models — something beyond the capabilities of some houses.
For one thing, conducting effective survey modeling involves matching IP addresses with your panelists — at COOL Media, we match log-level impression data to panelist IP addresses, giving you greater accuracy and granularity on the survey data.
Additionally, ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations like the EU’s GDPR when collecting and analyzing consumer data is critical for maintaining trust and legal compliance. Ensuring the data is properly collected and stored is the responsibility of anyone who does business online.
Lastly — as always — monitoring ad viewability and mitigating potential fraud in CTV environments is essential for accurate measurement of campaign effectiveness and ROI, especially when accounting for the down-funnel metrics.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, brand lift measurements offer substantial benefits to businesses looking to build their market presence and drive more-meaningful engagement. Brand lift goes beyond simplistic metrics like clicks and impressions to derive actionable insights into your brand marketing. Using this information, you can begin honing and refining your strategy, making adjustments and optimizations that will increase the return on your investment.
Additionally, brand lift studies provide tangible evidence of that ROI. Often, the data you get back from a campaign indicates you’ve gotten views, but it can be difficult to draw a line from your efforts to your sales. An effective brand study shows what’s working, and whether or not it is working.
If you’re an agency tired of wondering what works, COOL Media has the full-funnel solution that demands a look. You can get started today by reaching out to our team. With a focus on collecting information that you can use, COOL Media is a leading solution in CTV attribution and brand measurement.
