Ad Impressions for Japanese Cars Speed Past US, European Automakers’

U.S. automakers had a hard time keeping up with their Japanese counterparts in reaching U.S. consumers via TV and radio advertising, according to (pdf) the results of research from Integrated Media Measurement Inc. (IMMI), writes MarketingCharts.

The carmakers whose ads reached the most American buyers in late summer were Honda, Toyota, and Nissan; among the ads not reaching Americans were those of Cadillac, Buick, and GMC, IMMI said.

(See chart of IMMI’s Automotive Index for the fall. Note: 100 represents the average index number for all manufacturers; the amount each number falls above or below 100 is the percentage above or below the industry average that manufacturer placed.)

Japanese auto manufacturers reached on average 22 percent more audience than U.S. automakers and 27 percent more than European manufacturers, the report found (see chart).

The study was based on the number of times car ads were seen by consumers in New York, Houston, Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami - on television and radio -during August-October 2007.

• The automaker with the greatest number of overall net impressions on both radio and television was Honda, which garnered 28 percent more reach than the average of all the other automakers in the aggregate.
• Mazda had the most television net impressions at 37 percent above the average and BMW was an overwhelming leader in radio with 239 percent more impressions than the average.
• When it came to effectively using a cross-platform strategy, Ford had the highest percentage increase in their overall unique audience when adding a second medium, in this instance radio.
• Ford showed a 37 percent increase in their overall reach when the number of radio impressions was factored into their television numbers.

(See table for the leading manufacturers in each medium. The numbers in the radio and television columns show the total percentage for each medium [e.g., Ford’s 214 in radio shows that Ford had 114 percent more reach that the study average; Honda’s 92 shows Honda had 8 percent less reach than the industry average]. The change over television column shows the overall percentincrease in total reach when radio was added to the television numbers.)

“Looking at just radio, or just television, does not give advertisers a true sense of their campaign’s performance,” said Amanda Welsh, head of research for Integrated Media Measurement Inc.

“Rather than looking at isolated data, which will yield an incomplete picture, marketers need to implement a cross-platform measurement strategy to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns that are on multiple platforms. In addition to providing a more accurate analysis, this will also give marketers insight on how to use their budgets more efficiently and exponentially increase their reach by exploiting the synergy between media platforms.”