Ad Fontes Media vs Ebiquity

Topic of the Week: Pentagon Announces Hasan Execution by Firing Squad to be Livestreamed

Ad Fontes Media published a new Topic of the Week analysis on media coverage of the Pentagon's announcement that Hasan's execution by firing squad will be livestreamed.

Ad Fontes Media Releases Simple Media Bias Chart® of TV/Video Shows

Chart features 25 sources, including seven networks

Ad Fontes Media Releases New Charts and Topic Analyses

New featured post on Trump banning CNN, MSNBC, and Politico from the White House; new Simple Media Bias Chart for Podcasts featuring 24 shows; annual Simple Chart for Websites with 3000th website rated; new Topic of the Week on Jimmy Kimmel moving interview to YouTube.

Ad Awareness Regains Place in Effectiveness Planning

A new study by Thinkbox, Ebiquity, WPP Media, and Gain Theory, presented at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, analyzes 1,478 brands and 328,000 observations to argue that ad awareness is a valuable lead indicator in advertising effectiveness, not just an obsolete metric. The research finds that ad awareness accounts for 17% of brand consideration, of which only 6% is direct, while 11% works indirectly by improving brand perceptions. It also reports category-specific impacts, such as 69% in QSR delivery and 62% in lotteries. The author, Andrew Tindall, recommends that marketers reinstate ad awareness as a KPI, balancing it with attention and emotion in effectiveness planning.

• Study covers 1,478 brands across 128 sectors and 328,000 observations per model.
• Ad awareness accounts for 17% of brand consideration, with 11% indirect effect.
• Thinkbox, Ebiquity, WPP Media, and Gain Theory authored the research.

Retail Media Can Build Brands—Including Ways Other Media Can’t

This opinion column argues that retail media, often dismissed as performance-only, is a powerful brand-building channel. It challenges Mark Ritson's critique by citing research from Binet & Fields and Ebiquity that brand building should account for 55-60% of ad spend, while most budgets go to performance. The author claims retail media offers reach, mental availability, and higher ROI, citing Emarketer data showing its share across formats. P&G's off-site retail media investment reportedly doubled in a year. The piece advises shifting budgets from low-performing performance channels and black-box AI tools to retail media, emphasizing causal modeling over MMM to reveal its true value. It positions retail media as a complement to TV, not a threat.

• Emarketer data shows retail media constitutes 29% of search, 11% of programmatic display/video, 6% of social, 16% of CTV, and 15% of DOOH ad spend.
• Sensor Tower data indicates Procter & Gamble's off-site retail media investment more than doubled in the past year.
• According to the article, 70% of marketers say their marketing mix models do not account for retail media.