Strong hard research from leading online research company from Comscore and dunnhumbyUSA, an international leader in building sales and brand value for consumer goods and retail companies demonstrates that online advertising delivers greater bottom line sales ($$$$$) than TV advertising.

Over the course of twelve weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40 percent of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9 percent. This compares to an average lift of 8 percent for TV advertising. The detail of the survey is rich – The comScore dunnhumbyUSA research was conducted by examining the retail purchasing behavior of members of the comScore panel of 2 million Internet users who have given comScore explicit permission to monitor their online behavior. The studies focused on the 200,000 comScore and dunnhumbyUSA panelists who were members of supermarket loyalty programs and whose retail buying behavior was measured through point-of-sale UPC scanners at the checkout lanes of participating supermarket stores.

An obvious conclusion here is advertisers were able to reach their target audience online at significantly better prices than TV, and were able to deliver a better result. Now that’s value. As online advertising offers improved presentation and engagement using online video, the advertiser receives an additional benefit of cheaper creative costs vs. the traditionally heavy cost of television ad creatives.

There are of course holes and angles in research, I cannot see any compounder or cross-media detail in here but the volume of audience behaviours tracked, deliver a compelling piece of evidence. Still using TV and not onlne? View the online advertising vs tv advertising research release.