Online Advertising Leads to Supermarket Sales According to New Survey

A survey with ADTECH has shown sales promotions of online advertising for the retail business. ADTECH implements the French advertising impact study NetImpact 3 bis for IAB France, Marketing Scan and Kellogg’s as technical service providers.

Frankfurt, Germany – 22nd January 2007. The French survey NetImpact 3 bis has proven that online advertising has positively affected the sales of the fitness cereal Kellogg’s Special K in the supermarket. Firstly, advertising increased the sales volume in the retail business. Secondly, banner & co generated new customers for Special K in stationary trade.

Participating on the implementation of the advertising impact study were the online advertising provider ADTECH (www.adtech.info), the IAB France, the advertising customer Kellogg’s and the market research company Marketing Scan. Within six weeks, from mid June to end of July 2006, ADTECH delivered the online ads for Special K on numerous French websites – Advertising.com, Alice, Au Féminin, Benchmark Group, Doctissimo, France Télévisions, Hi-Media, Lagardère Active Publicité, Lycos, MSN/Windows Live, Orange, Régie Obs, Skyrégie, TF1 Publicité, Voyages SNCF, Yahoo!, Zefir Web.

Via geographical targeting, the ADTECH ad server adjusted the cereal banners in a way that only internet users from two French towns – Angers and Le Mans – got to see them. The market research company Marketing Scan had installed test panels in these two towns and was in connection with all supermarkets in the area. To compare the sales figures control data was collected twelve weeks before the virtual campaign and six weeks afterwards.

Jérôme De Labriffe, President of the IAB France, lauded the professional technical execution of the study at the presentation of the results in Paris in December 2006: ”ADTECH was our technology service provider that contributed many ideas and solutions to the study and that brought in its entire ad serving know how on the implementation of the online advertising. It was just as important that the ADTECH team explained the technical procedures like the local targeting to all participating parties and made them clear.“

The advertising delivered by ADTECH made the internet users buy eight percent more cereals in the supermarket than users that hadn’t seen it. Additionally Kellogg’s gained more customers through online advertising. 36 percent of the customers that had seen the ad and then bought the product were new customers. This is in contrast to to the 23 percent of new customers that had indeed bought the cereals but had not had contact with the online advertising.

Dirk Freytag, ADTECH CEO, was very enthusiastic about the results of the study: ”With projects like this advertising impact study for France we make online advertising more transparent and comparable with other advertising channels. It is exciting to see that we now do not only talk about click rates but actually change the media on the impact measurement. I would like to see more studies like that for other countries as well. That would be a great challenge for 2007.“

ADTECH, represented by an office in Paris, has been participating in NetImpact studies since 2005. The series of studies was started in 1999 to analyse the efficiency of online advertising.

More information on the study (available as PowerPoint presentation in French) is available upon request.