Nielsen said that the rest of the top five key attributes included ‘captivating’, ‘relatability’ and ‘non-negativity’.

The five key drivers offset the need to ‘go viral’ to raise awareness with consumers, the research found, and advertisers should instead create content that meets the key criteria highlighted in the research.

The findings are based on analysis of more than 1,000 US campaigns across podcasts, social media influencer content and branded content and in industries including consumer packaged goods, retail, automotive and financial services.

In addition to the five key attributes, Nielsen also identified some important considerations for applying the brand lift drivers to campaigns, including that brand recall is critical to achieving brand lift, with new media formats providing more opportunities for creativity than traditional advertising techniques.

Brand lift is highly dependent on how strong the brand already is, the research said, and research systems must therefore take this into account when comparing to normative data, or risk deprioritising good content on leader brands or prioritising bad content on challenger brands.

The four remaining factors – how enjoyable the content is, how captivating it is, how relatable it is and how well it avoids veering into negativity – are equally important to driving brand lift, Nielsen added.

Arica McKinnon, vice-president, campaign analytics, at Nielsen, said: “These newly identified brand lift drivers for emerging media provide advertisers deeper insights and unprecedented comparability for new media channels.

“This represents a huge step for advertisers to be able to leverage these fresh insights to critically evaluate their campaigns and make adjustments to reach consumers where they’re spending an increasing amount of time.”