Background
The MSW Creative GaugeTM AI service evaluates the sales potential of advertisements of different formats based on the content profile of the ad itself. Results are typically available within minutes making this low-cost tool ideal for applications such as competitive testing, concept screening, early-stage evaluation and landscape analysis.
The bathroom tissue category may not be one we think about much except when we need it. But it’s definitely a product we don’t want to run out of, as evidenced by it being one of the first items to disappear from shelves at the start of the pandemic. The guaranteed demand for this product has resulted in fierce competition from a handful of national brands competing for a share of our…uses. We decided to examine and evaluate a slice of recent advertising for each of five major brands in the category. For each brand, we selected two video ads and two static banner ads for evaluation by Creative Gauge AI.
Process
Once ads were selected, they were uploaded to the Creative Gauge dashboard and run past Meadow, the MSW AI assistant trained on years of MSW’s research into advertising content elements associated with sales effective ads. Utilizing MSW’s proprietary Creative Effectiveness Score (CES) model, Meadow provides an index summarizing overall ad strength (CES Index) as well as indices for four subcomponents:
- Brand Messaging
- Emotional Connection
- Brand Linkage
- Advertising Structure
Results
The first observation from the results is that, based on this small sampling of cases, advertising in the bathroom tissue category tends to be relatively strong, on average. This is true both for video ads and static digital banners, as the charts below illustrate (each bar representing an individual ad).
Which brands did the best? The following graph plots the average video ad CES index versus the average static banner ad CES index for each of the 5 brands. Both category leader Charmin and bargain brand Scott exhibit very strong results for both ad formats; Quilted Northern lags well behind the rest of the brands for both formats; Angel Soft excels with digital banners; and Cottonelle is just slightly above average for both ad formats.
Across brands, the video ads in this category are particularly successful in terms of building an emotional connection and achieving brand linkage. Brands in this category effectively utilize familiar characters to connect with consumers and ensure effective linkage to the brand. This includes the antics of the Charmin Bears, cuteness of the Angel Soft Angels and more recently the humor of Ken Jeong in promotion of Cottonelle. Will the recently introduced Quilted Queens do the same for Quilted Northern?
On the other hand, the digital ads excel in terms of brand messaging. This is largely due to the heavy use of comparative claims of superiority utilized by most of the brands in the category. Whether it is in terms of softness, strength, absorbency or number of sheets, each brand is trying to differentiate itself functionally from the rest of the category.
The video ad with the highest CES Index is a 30 second spot for Charmin which focuses on its relatively new Smooth Tear design. This spot not only features the Charmin Bears, fixtures in Charmin advertising for the past 25 years, demonstrations and comparisons, but it also introduces the new dimension of tearability into the category’s advertising wars. The result is an ad that is strong across the board:
The strongest static digital ad is the Angel Soft banner shown below. The ad not only makes strong comparative claims, but it also incorporates a strong emotional component through the use of humor and a cute child character, while also keeping the product itself firmly in the center of the action.
If you would like more information on this study or a demonstration and free trial of the MSW Creative Gauge AI service, please contact us.