Snapshot

Advertisers often ask the same question: What makes a good newspaper ad?

And the next question is: Do you have examples?

The NMA has worked with Kantar Media to produce a fresh new way to answer these questions.

Creative Benchmarking, based on Kantar’s TV creative benchmarking system, has been developed specifically for national newspaper advertising.

Behind the benchmark

Creative Benchmarking will be the UK’s largest database of consumer response to national newspaper advertising. Using ad measures that already command wide respect, it will provide advertisers with robust measurement of, and insight into, the performance of their advertising. And of their competitors’ advertising.

It will allow them to evaluate the performance of their TV and newspaper advertising in a similar way. It allows cost-effective testing of multiple ads, showing advertisers which of their ads have worked hardest for the brand – and whether competitors’ ads have worked better.

Each ad will be researched with consumers and scores will be benchmarked against the overall database average and the category average.

Over time, the averages should rise as the standard of ads improves, as more clients and agencies understand what works to engage the consumer.

Even the initial batch of ads in the database, from national newspapers in the first quarter of 2010, show clearly that newspaper ads can achieve scores comparable to TV ads.

The brochure you can download above highlights the performance of the best of the first 186 ads in the database – from now on, at least 12 new ads will be added to the database each month.

You can access the Creative Benchmarking database here or via the navigation menu on the left.

To get your brands involved in the Creative Benchmarking project, please get in touch with us here.