Cultural affinity and long-term memory coding that drives future demand: How pairing high-attention Winter Olympic Games content and digital out-of-home delivered gold for brands

Host: Nadia Cameron, Publisher | Editor – Marketing

In a fragmented media landscape, reach isn’t the only factor broadcast channels need to deliver brands. They also need to grab attention – a vital quantity in building the mental availability and positive, differentiated associations brands require to stand out and be considered. Marketers know it and they’re crying out for ways to achieve it: Per a recent study undertaken by QMS, reach, ROI and attention are the top three investment priorities for Aussie marketers looking to connect what they’re doing through to the commercial line.

With the QMS Winter Games Network, digital-out-of-home’s ability to deliver this trifecta skated into premium position as it served up a public, shared, high-attention broadcast layer that connected brands to cultural and contextually relevant sporting moments in real time.

Built on the success of QMS’s Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games network, the Milano Cortina Winter Games approach delivered a custom built, 100% digital out-of-home network that paired brand advertising with dynamic content. In all, over 9,400 pieces of dynamic content were broadcast during the four-week tournament across 1,108 panels nationally, reaching over 10 million Australians and delivering 278 million total impressions. Think breaking news, medal moments from bob sledding to ski jumping and highlight reels, interspersed with brand messaging, all delivered in real-time.

But importantly, extensive new research undertaken by Kantar and Neuro-Insight showed these highly contextual and attention-grabbing plays also resulted in meaningful brand equity gains not only for Games affiliated sponsors, but non-sponsors alike.

“We saw a significant increase in things like consideration, brand affinity, brand preference, as well as those deeper, broader brand perceptions,” said Kantar Australia head of media effectiveness, Sharon Hilton. “Those are more important because they're obviously much closer to driving future choice rather than awareness alone. They tell us people are noticing the brands, and that they're becoming more positively predisposed towards them as well.”

That juxtaposition of powerful, emotive games content and brand advertising provided weighty uplift: 84% of brands strengthened positive associations, from community minded to value and customer focused. Gains were also category neutral: From Allianz to Samsung, advertisers all scored a halo effect from being associated with dynamic content, driving deeper connections in market.

Per Kantar, participation in the Winter Games network benchmarked even higher than out-of-home category norms: Advertisers saw 1.2 times stronger consideration to choose their brand, and came out 1.3 times stronger on driving deeper brand perceptions.

And significantly, there was a +19% lift in long-term memory encoding compared to global benchmarks. That’s critical to influencing behaviour, Neuro-Insight global principal consultant, Peter Pynta, said.

“Without memory encoding, you have no mental availability,” he said. “When you talk about marketing communications, there's a very, very high correlation between memory encoding of your brand, of your communications, and successive predictors of consumer behaviour, or behaviour in in general.

“I can't think of a more important metric … to measure the effectiveness of some things that are pretty nuanced."

Winter Games network advertiser results matched the delta brands saw during QMS’s first Summer Olympics DOOH network play, despite the differing sports program and Australia’s smaller chance of tallying up medals. It’s proof for Pynta that brands associated with such an emotive cultural moment and dynamic content win big on affinity.