On Device Research has revealed that mobile is a truly effective brand building platform for FMCG advertisers with the sector outperforming the mobile industry average across three out of five brand metrics tested. Video mobile ads have proven to be the most effective at driving FMCG brand awareness while rich banners are the most effective at boosting purchase intent.
“We bombard consumers with thousands of ads a day… but all of this activity is not breaking through the clutter. It’s just creating more noise,” said Marc Pritchard, P&G’s Chief Brand Officer and arguably the world’s most powerful marketer in April of this year.
Pritchard’s comments reflect not only a frustration that advertisers in general have with the digital advertising eco-system, but also talks very directly to the challenges faced by the FMCG sector – the largest ad market globally, and one to which the issue of ad measurement is compounded by the still predominately offline nature of purchase fulfilment that typifies FMCG consumer behaviour.
For many FMCG marketers, digital campaign success still has to be measured via proxies which include metrics as diverse as demographic reach, ad viewability, video completion and click through rates. However, not only are these metrics considered proxies for success but they are short term in their nature, and tell us nothing of the long-term brand impact that digital spend has. For a sector around whom the entire discipline of brand advertising was essentially created not to have adequate brand metrics in place to assess the impact of digital, creates a huge disservice to FMCG ad creativity.
On Device Research has therefore released a raft of insight in to how FMCG advertising works on the dominant digital ad platform – mobile – and can reveal that across three of five key brand metrics tested, FMCG campaigns tend to outperform the cross-industry average: 
FMCG ads on mobile tend to drive larger shifts in both spontaneous and top-of-mind brand awareness, while at the lower end of the purchase funnel they outperform the norm in terms of driving purchase intent – on average driving a +6% delta increase. Combined with the fact that On Device [has proven that there is a strong correlation](https://ondeviceresearch.com/blog/can-mobile-intentions-predict-in-store-behaviours%3F) between Purchase Intent and actual retail store footfall, the argument for focusing on how to effectively drive bottom of funnel metrics is a strong one.
Further analysis of On Device Research’s ad effectiveness database has revealed the key creative formats that should be considered in FMCG campaigns. It should be noted that the richer the media, the more impact it has in catching consumer attention at the top of the branding funnel. Moving down through the funnel however, less intrusion to the consumer experience is linked to higher brand persuasion, hence the impact of a rich banner in driving purchase intent as opposed to more interruptive rich interstitials or video units. 
In an age of - as Marc Pritchard puts it - significant digital ad clutter, On Device Research’s database of mobile FMCG ad effectiveness should be used not only to create digital campaign KPI’s but should also be deployed as a planning tool to optimise the delivery of creative against key campaign goals.
If you’d like to find out more about how to measure brand impact or [store footfall](https://ondeviceresearch.com/mobile-store-effect), then get in touch with On Device Research today:
