BRC's Advertising Response Model gives a quick visual picture of how an ad or commercial performed. It uses colors instead of numbers to show the results of 49 diagnostic measures providing a detailed view of what is driving the success of the advertising - or holding it back.

Adjectives that respondents can use to describe the advertisement are listed down the left. The color shows if the number that used that word to describe the advertisement was in the top third, the middle third or the bottom third of the scores for that word among the commercials that constitute BRC's norms. Top third means the most favorable third. For negative adjectives that means the third that checked the word the least.

Adjectives are combined into sub-clusters and major clusters that reflect the basic types of reactions people have to almost all advertising. The more emotional, affective, and executionally oriented reactions are on the top half of the chart. The more rational, message oriented reactions are toward the bottom. Measures of overall impact are toward the right.

BRC's ARM has a high level of intuitive face-validity. It shows advertising the way most people understand it. But it also has a solid foundation in theory and basic research. The split between emotional and rational reactions is based on the work of Petty and Cacioppo on central and peripheral processing. The way the basic factors feed into attitudes toward the ad and attitudes toward the product are based on the causal modeling of Lutz and his colleagues. The adjectives were drawn originally from the work of Wells, Levitt and McConville and enlarged in collaboration with Alex Biel and David Aaker. The clusters are based on years of factor analysis by Clark Levitt.

References for studies cited above:

Wells, Leavitt, McConville, "Reaction Profile for TV", Journal of Advertising Research, December 1971

Aaker, Stayman, "Measuring Audience Perceptions of Commercials and Relating Them to Ad Impact", Journal of Advertising Research, August/September 1990