From glass half full to glass overflowing: Understanding the total ROI from advertising

Robert Graves, Bernard Brenner and Akaash Nanda

Microsoft, the multinational technology company, set out to model the impact of ad dollars on both sales and various brand perceptions in the same model.

Our journey to better understand the impact of advertising dollars on sales beyond the short run. Operating on a hunch, we ventured to harness the wealth of customer perception data and the best of existing statistical models at Microsoft to deliver a measurement of advertising's long-term impact. The value this exercise would deliver to the business, however, was unprecedented.

Executive Summary

Stemming from a desire to get a more holistic understanding of what our advertising dollars do for our business, we set out on a journey to model the impact of ad dollars on both sales and various brand perceptions...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands