28 November 2008
	BEST-LIKED TV ADVERTISEMENTS City Lodge's bare market By Charles Foster

Television advertising is a hot topic of conversation among consumers around the world. Almost everyone with access to TV has a favourite ad, as well as one they love to hate. It's the same in SA. Millward Brown's Adtrack system is uniquely placed to evaluate, on a level playing field, the response to all SA's TV advertising. Providing a census of new TV adverts, it has measured more than 50 000 in the past 20 years, but it is "likeability" that best seems to strike a chord with consumers and advertisers alike. Likeability, though only one of many measures, continues to show correlations with media effectiveness. Other measures of communication and persuasion illustrate that liking is only one of the components that should be looked at when evaluating the totality of advertising efficiency. It is quite possible to have well-liked adverts that fail to generate sales response or effective communication, but liking is a measure that correlates with consumer engagement and as such remains a valuable indicator of an advert's ability to break through an increasingly cluttered environment. So what have we seen in the past 18 months? It is pleasing to note that South Africans have not lost their sense of humour. Many of the favourite adverts, and indeed the best-liked ad across all markets - featuring a City Lodge guest so at home in his hotel that he wanders naked into the public area - are humorous. In fact, more than 50% of the top 20 ads used humour in some manner. That's much as before. What also remains relatively true is that car, mobile-phone network and soft drink advertisements feature to a greater extent than other products. Though these are undoubtedly heavy spenders, therefore allowing by sheer volume a better chance of featuring on this list, there are categories such as retail, financial and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) that still seem under-represented. Take finance; it is rare for this to feature on our best-liked list. One could ask if this is a function of the grudge-purchase nature of the business, or is it that advertising agency creatives have failed to "crack" financial advertising? Internationally, such ads have achieved considerable consumer popularity. So maybe it is just an SA problem. This is the first year in which we have reported on the SA market as a single unit. In the past, we have run two tables based on the living standards measure (LSM), which segments consumers according to living standards. LSM 5-8 was effectively a developing market, and LSM 8 and above, the developed market. Over the past couple of years these LSMs have converged and the results are no longer skewed by splits, so we could now argue that in advertising terms at least, SA has become a truly homogeneous nation. Foster is MD of Millward Brown SA