New research commissioned by ad tech provider HIRO Media and conducted by Nielsen Media Lab reveals that relevant content to a target audience drove a 30% increase in viewers’ recall and purchase intent derived from online video ads. This kind of halo effect is common in TV where the program influences the brand. The most pronounced increase found in the research was a 65% effectiveness increase for sports content and male-oriented auto ads.

Conversely, the research did not find a positive correlation between player size and ad effectiveness for known brands (large player size was 640x360 and small player size was 300x250), which confirmed IAB research from 2008. This is especially important because ad pricing for a big player in a top 5 site can be 500% higher than a small player in a comScore top 1,000 site, even though the increase in effectiveness is less than 5%.

One exception to this was that the research found that large player sizes did yield a positive impact for unknown brands, so the research recommends that “being loud” with ads in a big player size.

The research emphasized that understanding true effectiveness measures are more important than traditional key performance indicators like viewability and view-through rate because the latter don’t measure ROI by themselves. Ultimately an ad needs to lead to an action by a viewer in order to generate a genuine ROI.

The research can be downloaded here.