Long Form vs Short Form Spots Impact in Sales

As Beer remained the most consumed alcoholic drink in Romania due to long-standing consumption habits, the popularity of domestic brands and strong activity by international players, the total volume sales continued to grow in the year before the pandemic, although more slowly than any time in the last five years. How did the category grow? Non alcoholic beer, previously boosted by the launch of various fruit-flavoured products, was the most dynamic category in 2019 in total volume growth terms, further underlining the wide-reaching popularity of beer as many consumers’ drink of choice. Beer is expected to record low total volume growth for the forecast period as a whole, with non alcoholic beer and dark offering the best prospects for total volume growth.

The beer market continues to grow in the pre pandemic year as well, but it decelerates by one percentage point along with the TV investment, which decreased in volume by 21% In 2020, the market leader increased its airtime 0% by 65% compared to 2019 and this led to anincrease of share of voice in category from 15% -20% to more than 24%.

The investment increase was among the main reasons for the market share increase of 1.8 p.p. compared to 2019, representing more than 77% of the two main competitors’ loss.

Most brands decreased their TV investments in 2020 while loosing market share. The market leader increased its TV spending volume by 35% compared to prior year and manages to decrease by half of the market average. Fourth place on the market last year increased its TV spendings by 56% compared to prior year and manages to gain 2 p.p. in market share, becoming third player.

The short spots gained in share in the last years as the TV channels were sold out. The maximum weight is reached in 2019, when the equivalent GRPs brought by the short spots of advertisers in the beer sector represented almost one quarter of the entire industry spend. In 2020 the short spots lost momentum, once the SOR of the TV channels decreased as some advertisers temporarily reduced their communication in summer.

The all time peak in short form of the spots weight was reached in March 2020: 42%. In the third quarter, the weight in audience of the short spots returned to pre-pandemic levels: 22%. In the analysis we used four years of monthly sold volume data by brand provided by Market Vector. We used least squares regression to fit a generalized linear model and compute the influence of the TV investment in sales variation.

As expected, the TV investment alone explains less than 10% of the total variation of the sales (the rest coming from promotions and other types of media investment).