How does online video-based advertising perform in reaching Millennials and Gen Z? Part II.

Research study on attention and brand recall for social reel, social feed and pre-roll advertising

Mark Vroegrijk, Senior Methodologist

Nowadays, many brand managers will admit that one of their biggest challenges is determining how to effectively reach the youngest members of their target audience – i.e., “Millennial” or “Gen-Z” consumers – through advertising campaigns. According to a recent report by the World Advertising Research Center, consumers that fall within one of these demographic groups typically spend the vast majority (60-65%) of their media consumption on online channels. As a result, brands seeking to advertise through video also tend to allocate considerable parts of their advertising efforts to online channels (instead of TV) to be noticed by these younger consumers.

Still, within the broad area of online video-based advertising, there are various ways to advertise. For example, given the prominence of video content platforms like YouTube (whose daily user base largely consists of consumers aged 15-35), a popular option is to employ pre-rolls – advertisements that are played before an actual content video and can often be skipped after some time. Also, often used are feed advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram (with especially the latter being often used by younger age groups). This form of ad consists of a video with a copy (added text), placed on the main feed between content from friends and other profiles the user follows.

Lastly, yet another type has gained traction, social reel advertising. These short, full-screen sponsored videos appear among reels of non-promoted videos and users can scroll through these different videos by swiping with their fingers. Such ads initially became more common on the TikTok platform, which is quickly catching up to Instagram in terms of popularity among particularly Gen-Z consumers. Even though TikTok has a smaller user base, it has a clear advantage in terms of average time spent on the app. However, Facebook and Instagram now have a “Reels” feature as well. The increased prominence of these social reel ads raises the question of how the format performs compared to other types of online video-based advertising, among an audience for whom these types of ads are normally employed. Therefore, compared to social feed and pre-roll advertising, we decided to assess the impact of social reel advertisements in terms of both immediate attention and longer-term memory amongst Millennials and Gen-Z.

A NATURAL TEST ENVIRONMENT FOR SOCIAL REEL ADVERTISING

To measure the impact of social reel video advertisements, we sent the online survey to ±6,500 respondents across four European countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom), all aged between 18-34 years. The survey was mobile-only and was aimed to imitate a typical smartphone “browsing session” by letting the respondent:

• Scroll through four “feeds” similar to mobile apps or websites featuring, sports and entertainment tailored to the respondent’s country of residence, with an online display ad inserted in each of them.
• Navigate through two sets of social reels – each set consisting of seven TikTok videos presented in a randomised order. Six reels were unbranded (originally posted by celebrities, influencers or sportspeople) and one was branded. The latter was randomly selected out of a pool of 32 possible advertisements which were again tailored to the respondent’s country of residence.

The respondent was able to scroll or swipe through each of these “environments” in a natural-like manner without knowing that we would record how much time they spent looking at each of the social reel ads before swiping to the next video. Subsequently, we tested both aided and unaided brand recall by asking respondents which brand(s) they remembered from the advertisements and whether they could recall the message that these brands were conveying. This approach provided us with data on both the engagement (in terms of attention) and the impact (in terms of memory) of social reel advertisements. Because we collected such data for social feed and online pre-roll advertisements in previous studies as well, we were able to assess how social feed advertising performed compared to other types of online video-based advertising, particularly among a younger audience. To ensure that this comparison was fair, we only considered respondents from these studies who filled in the survey on a mobile device and were aged between 18 and 34. Altogether, our final data set included ±10,500 respondents, with Table 1 displaying how many ads (±380 in total) were covered for each of the three types of online video-based advertising in each of the four countries.

Table 1: Number of tested ads per country/advertising format

HOW LONG DO VIEWERS pay ATTENTION?

The graph below represents the length of viewers’ attention paid to social reel advertising compared to both social feed and pre-roll advertising. For pre-roll advertisements, it should be noted that we tested them by mimicking YouTube’s “TrueView” method, with ads becoming skippable after 5 seconds – explaining the engagement curve only decreasing from the 5-second mark onwards.

Several interesting insights emerged from this graph:

• Social reel advertising (skipped by swiping to the next video in line) is significantly better in holding its audience’s attention than social feed advertising (skipped by scrolling ahead to other posts further along the feed).
• After the ads run for 5 seconds, a social reel ad had about 5 times the number of original viewers (43%) compared to social feed ads (17%).
• On average, viewers spent 3 seconds watching social reel ads and only 2.7 seconds watching social feed ads.
• When it comes to “longer-term” audience retention, we see that social reel advertisements perform quite similarly to pre-roll advertising (with a difference of 5 percentage points or less) after the 10-second mark has passed.

To conclude, social reel advertisements do better than social feed advertisements in terms of attention from the get-go. However, they are still notably outperformed by pre-roll advertisements in the first 10 seconds – logically resulting from a guaranteed forced exposure for this format during the first 5 seconds. However, we see that social reel advertisements are quickly catching up thereafter, with their audience retention rate at the 15-second mark nearly matching that of pre-rolls. This is consistent with the observation that TikTok videos tend to be highly geared towards holding attention as long as possible – as this sharply increases the chance for them being promoted to a wider audience by the platform’s underlying algorithms.

Figure 1: Number of viewers (mobile only, aged 18-34) left at each elapsed second
for different types of online video-based advertising

Social reel advertising is often used by brands to reach the youngest consumers. Therefore, it is also interesting to zoom in on the comparative performance of social reel advertising when it comes to attention between different age cohorts.

Table 2: Audience retention scores for different age brackets

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) higher than differently coloured scores on the same audience retention metric within each age group

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) lower than differently coloured scores on the same audience retention metric within each age group

Table 2 displays audience retention scores for the social reel, social feed and pre-roll advertising formats separately for three age groups: 18-24, 25-29 and 30-34.

We obtained the following insights:

• Social feed advertising performs very similarly in terms of engagement across different age groups. The overall attention levels were consistently very low compared to the other two advertising formats studied.
• For both social reel and pre-roll advertising, we generally see lower attention levels among the youngest (18-24) consumer group. This is most notable at the 15-second mark, in which the share of youngest viewers was around 7 percentage points lower than in the 30-34 age group.
• The comparative performance of social reel ads vis-à-vis pre-roll ads tends to be better among the two youngest (18-24 and 25-29) age groups because both formats show fairly similar attention levels. However, among consumers aged 30-34, we see pre-rolls clearly taking the lead. When it comes to audience retention at the 10-second mark for, example, pre-rolls had 45% retention compared to only 35% for social reels.

Gen-Z recalls social reel ads the BEST

In the first part of our analysis, we found out that social reel advertising performs similarly to (or better than) other types of online video-based advertising in terms of viewer attention. We could then hypothesise that viewers of such ads also process their content (e.g. what brand does the ad represent and what is the message it aims to convey) to at least a similar degree. The next question thus becomes: how do social reel ads perform in terms of recall of the brand and main message?

Table 3 shows a comparison between the percentage of respondents that were able to recall the advertised brand and its key message across the three different types of advertising. Particularly brand recall is important for impactful advertising. If viewers cannot remember what brand was represented by the ad, any positive effect that was generated is lost because the viewer simply cannot link this response to the brand.

Regarding brand recall, we can conclude the following:

• Pre-rolls outperform the other two formats concerning unaided brand recall (which generally serves as a strong indicator of an advertisement’s level of post-exposure brand linkage). That again may be the result of a guaranteed full retention of the audience during the first five seconds.
• However, for aided brand recall we see that social reel advertising now performs similarly to pre-roll advertising. Social feed advertising is slightly lagging.
• For message recall, we again see both social reel (42%) and pre-roll (43%) advertising reaching highly similar levels of message recall, whereas the gap with social feed advertising (38%) has now widened a bit.

Table 3: Recall scores for different types of online video-based advertising

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) higher than differently coloured scores on the same recall metric

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) lower than differently coloured scores on the same recall metric

When we analyse the performance of the different forms of online video-based advertising among different age groups, as displayed in Table 4, we gain some additional insights.

• Among the 18-24 age group, social reel advertising outperforms especially well compared to the other two advertising formats. In this youngest group, social reel ads score similarly to pre-rolls when it comes to unaided brand recall, and have the upper edge concerning aided brand recall and message recall.
• Conversely, for the oldest (30-34) respondents in our study, we instead see pre-roll ads outperforming social reel ads on every recall metric – consistent with our observation that this format also scored best in terms of audience retention among this group. Finally, and perhaps not too surprisingly, the “middle” 25-29 age group shows a mix of the previous findings, with no format consistently outperforming the others across all recall metrics.

Table 4: Recall scores for different age brackets

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) higher than differently coloured scores on the same recall metric within each age group

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) lower than differently coloured scores on the same recall metric within each age group

A CROSS-COUNTRY PERSPECTIVE ON AD PERFORMANCE

Finally, given that our study covers multiple countries, it is interesting to zoom in on the results on a country-by-country basis as well. Table 5 shows the average audience retention and recall scores (across the three online video-based advertising formats) that were obtained for each country.

Table 5: Performance scores for different countries

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) higher than differently coloured scores on the same metric within each country

XX% Significantly (under 95% confidence interval) lower than differently coloured scores on the same metric within each country

When it comes to attention, we already noticed that social feed advertising struggles on this front, and this pattern remains highly consistent across all four countries. When we look at the social reel and pre-roll advertising instead, we again find that attention levels are fairly comparable between these two formats for the majority of countries, albeit Germany now forms a clear exception. In this market, we find that even towards the end of a typical video (i.e. the 15-second mark), pre-roll advertising has a clear advantage in terms of audience retention (of about 10 percentage points) over social reel advertising.

Interestingly, the higher attention that is paid by German consumers to pre-roll advertising does not mean that this format is an all-around winner in terms of recall. For unaided brand recall, pre-roll advertising does take the lead, but for message recall, we see social reel advertising actually performing better – despite the lower attention rates for such ads.

For the remaining countries, in which we saw pre-roll and social reel ads commanding similar levels of attention, we do see one of the formats coming out ahead of the other when it comes to recall. Interestingly, in the Netherlands, this is social reel advertising, while in Sweden and (especially) the United Kingdom, pre-rolls are the winner. This shows that even across geographically close and culturally similar Western-European countries, differences in advertising style and media consumption behaviour may cause different advertising formats to emerge as the most effective.

A GOOD PERFORMER, BUT NOT WITHOUT ITS CAVEATS

To conclude, our study showed that social reel advertising performs relatively well among a young (18-34) consumer audience. Compared to social feed advertising, a format that has been around for much longer, we find that the reel format is much better able to overcome the typical challenge of social advertising: i.e. grabbing and keeping the viewer’s attention. Subsequently, this increased audience retention leads to an improved recall of the brand and message as well. In fact, social reel advertising often scores more or less on par with pre-roll advertising, which, given the fact that pre-rolls benefit from a guaranteed 5-second exposure, certainly places social reel advertising in a positive light. In addition, our study provided us with the following insights:

• Instead of performing similarly to pre-roll ads, we see social reel advertising actually outperforming them among the youngest consumers (ages 18-24) in our study (when it comes to recalling). This reveals a good match between where this type of advertising will have the greatest reach on the one hand and the greatest impact on the other.
• However, among somewhat older consumers (i.e. those aged 30+), we see the reverse of this pattern, with pre-rolls resulting in better recall scores. This can at least be partly attributed to differences in audience retention among this age group, with ad skipping occurring more often (and earlier) for social reel ads than for pre-roll ads.
• Cross-country differences may play a role as well. While social reel ads tend to come out ahead of other online video-based formats in the Netherlands, we see pre-roll ads still (clearly) performing better in other countries such as Germany (in terms of viewer attention) and the United Kingdom (in terms of recall).

Overall, while reel advertising is better able to deal with the “attention challenge” on social media (compared to feed advertising), we still see that less than half of the intended audience watches the first five seconds of a social reel ad – which can be problematic for advertisers who fail to quickly convey what the ad is about. Consequently, just like with other forms of online advertising, immediate attention-grabbing and rapid exposure of both brand and message remain critical.

Read our previous article on How do online video-based ads perform in reaching Millennials and Gen Z part I.  >>