Stacking the Advertising Odds in Your Favour

No doubt, advertising is a great way of building your brand and getting your message out to the world. Many an ad has become the topic of everyday conversation--some of the best have even found their way into our daily lexicon, with creative that zings and sings, gets attention, and sticks. With that kind of power, why test advertising creative? The benefits are worth a closer look.

Creative ideas win awards and accolades, but there are a number of substantial reasons for testing your advertising creative before it launches:

• Ads that miss the mark represent a significant real cost in terms of wasted media investment. At best, weak advertising is an opportunity cost--a campaign that could have worked for the brand failed to do so.
• Advertising that is off-mark can also result in softening sales or a weaker distinction in brand equity between your brand and competitors-especially if competitors get it right at the same time your campaign is not meeting objectives.
• In some cases, ads can result in damaging a brand's image--we don't see this often but we do see it.

Advertising can go wrong in many ways. We know from mining our testing and tracking databases at Ipsos that having a relevant strategy is critical building block for a communication campaign. Starting out on the right foot is important and though it sounds like a given, it is often easier said than done.

There are other predictors of successful advertising...

• Likeability. Audiences are more likely to pay attention to an ad they like and are therefore more likely to recall and internalize the main message.
• Believability. If they believe it, it is more likely to persuade.
• Use of devices. Devices help with breakthrough and recall--a few that can work effectively include humour, music, continuing characters, and celebrities.
• Make the brand the hero. Integrate the brand into the story of an ad.
• In television advertising, brand early and brand often. This is best done in a variety of ways including naming the brand out loud, showing the brand in use, showing packaging, and badging the ad with the brand.
• Keep it simple. If the audience has to work at understanding an ad, chances are they will tune out.

You might think you can catch creative problems through your advertising tracking process. This may be true, but by then it is often too late. By that point, large sums have already been invested in creating and executing the concept and media buys--money and time you don't get back. In the advertising research world, testing and tracking serve different purposes at different stages of the adverting lifecycle.

In-market advertising tracking is an ideal tool for assessing how ads are performing in the context of real-life media spend and competitive activity. However, it can only support creative course correction after advertising production is complete and media has been running for a number of weeks. That's pretty far down the line to be making changes, especially if big changes are needed.

Getting noticed and being persuasive are as relevant for marketing financial services or electronics as they are for selling veggie burgers or a quit smoking campaign. Testing allows advertisers to vet multiple strategic ideas and/or creative platforms. Assessing ideas this way encourages creative risk taking that can mean big breakthroughs because it encourages the development of options and provides a mechanism for selecting the best ideas for development and production.

We recommend testing ads--or at least creative strategies--to be sure the communication will breakthrough the thousands of marketing messages we see everyday, and ultimately be persuasive. In our view, creative is best tested using a quantitative methodology that provides clear direction, healthy sample sizes, geographic representation of the target audience, and norms that provide context for whether findings are above or below average.

The three greatest barriers we see to testing creative are:

• Awareness of testing options.
• Not allowing enough time to test between approved creative mock-ups and final production.
• Limited or no budget to test.

Ipsos has developed a wide variety of proven and predictive copy testing tools suited to nearly every marketer's advertising research and testing needs. In addition to our full-service range of copy testing options, we've recently developed AdPulse--a new advertising testing service specifically designed for those facing many of the barriers mentioned above. AdPulse delivers test results very quickly on a shoe string budget. To learn more, contact Kim Short at 778.373.5031 or email her at [email protected].