Share fell more the longer brands went dark

Going dark means stopping your advertising altogether. The largest study of it followed brands that stopped for a year or more. On average their market share fell in the first year and kept falling in every year they stayed dark, and brands that were already losing share fell furthest.

Researchers at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute looked at hundreds of brands that stopped advertising for at least a year. They used a large US household panel and advertising spend data across 22 supermarket categories. On average, share was lower after the first year and lower again in each year after that. An earlier study by the same group, on alcohol brands in Australia, found the same pattern. Older controlled tests described in the paper, where TV advertising was stopped in some areas and kept running in others, found lower sales after a year in about half the cases.

The average hides a wide spread. After the first year, about half the brands hadn't lost much share. More had fallen by the second year, and more again by the third. In the first year, small and big brands fell by about the same. From the second year on, small brands fell further. "Big" here means any brand in the top half of its category by share, not only the leaders. Brands that were already losing share before they stopped lost the most, whatever their size. Brands in the top half that were stable or growing barely moved over three years, though only a few of them stayed dark that long. In a handful of categories, brands held or grew share after they stopped mass media advertising. By the third year, categories people buy less often had fallen further. Even so, size and direction together explained only a small part of which brands fell.

It helps to know what the study can't tell you. It follows each brand's own history, with no group of similar brands that kept advertising to compare against, and it didn't track price, promotions or shelf space. So some of the fall may come from whatever made the owner stop. It is packaged goods in the US. It tracked mass media (TV, radio, print, outdoor, cinema and online display), so some of these brands may have kept going on search or social. It only counts brands that survived, which may make going dark look less harmful than it is. It did not look at services, durables or B2B, or at stops of less than a year. And it measured share, not why share fell.

So what can you do with it? Before you stop, look at which way your share has been moving and how big your brand is in its category. A brand that is already losing share has the most to lose by going dark. A brand in the top half of its category that is holding or growing came through best, though few of those stayed dark beyond a year or two. A one-year stop cost less, on average, than two or three. The study didn't compare spending less with stopping, because every brand in it stopped. But given how often share fell once spending stopped, keeping some advertising going is the safer bet. And if you do stop, track your share month by month alongside a measure of how many people think of your brand, so you see early if it is going the wrong way.

Charlie