A recently released Millward Brown study encourages companies to increase their spending on Internet ads. The CTV-1 study, conducted by the Millward Brown Futures Group, started off a series of investigations into digital media. Millward Brown uses the term CTV in these studies to describe consumer-controlled television/video viewing. The long term goal is to explore digital media’s impact–both potential and realized–on branding.

The CTV-1 study compared the effect of 30-second ads when viewed during TV shows at air-time, time-lapsed via DVR and on demand at the networks’ Web sites. While the advertising performed positively in all three viewing situations, the online viewers demonstrated a higher level of engagement–making brand consideration and favorability far more likely. The support behind this conclusion comes from the observation that online viewers were 53 percent more likely to pay attention to ads than their live TV-viewing counterparts. As for DVR, we all know how easy it is to fast forward through the ads thus bring an hour long show down to a convenient 45 minute viewing time.

Because the same ad is played 3 or 4 times when a show is viewed online, this group of viewers demonstrated ad recall at four times the rate of those in the air-time TV or DVR groups. Consumer engagement seems to be key–while ads aired on regular TV led to 54 percent brand awareness and 18 percent brand recall the online ads trumped at 82 percent awareness and 77 percent recall.