From The 50^th Annual Advertising Research Foundation Convention, April 26-28 2004, NY

3.  Differentiating promises are what now drive brand value. Y&R’s Ed Lebar continued the convention’s "re-think" theme with new data on brand development. He found advertising is not the key driver any more. A Y&R panel of 6000 respondents showed finding ways to differentiate promises is the key to developing brands people will pay more for. It is not the same as relevance. Differentiation builds consideration. Relevance builds trial. Together they account for the brand’s strength. Some of us thought it sounded like a rediscovery of the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) from a previous generation.

4.  Forget everything you know about the future of TV. Media visionary Alan Wurtzel of NBC said the "big tent" program that everybody likes has become a rarity. Audience flow that aided new programs that followed an old program with a big audience only happens now if you are lucky. Counter programming to keep the other network’s big program from getting too large an audience is something you can forget when cable is already offering so many alternatives. The "least objectionable program" (LOP) that could be counted on to always get some audience from those who wanted to watch TV regardless of what is on was great while it lasted. But now cable continuously offers something for virtually every taste. He concluded his comments about the future of network TV saying there are only two rules that will hold: 1.) Good stories, well told, will be watched. 2.) In this business, nobody knows anything.

7.  Physiological measurements of emotion hold promise. The 4As and the ARF are starting a major "Emotion in Advertising" project to explore Zaltman’s theories. The project includes looking at "a wide range" of physiological measures. In another talk, Bruce Hall (Answer Stream) described recent success measuring feelings with minimally intrusive physiological testing that only required placing electrodes on three fingers. He agreed with most other speakers that what we have recently learned about decision-making means a think-feel-do model like AIDA is not as valid as feel-do-think models. So, he explored feelings with 36 respondents and five commercials. He found skin conductance (GSR) measured interest and involvement, correlating with an orienting response. Pulse measured mental workload or cognitive processing, and heart rate measured pleasure and displeasure. A careful review of those pleasure/displeasure findings would seem in order in view of the old claims the good Professor Hess made that pupillometrics could tell the difference between attraction and repulsion way back in Marion Harper’s day at InterPublic. It was a decade before other academics showed how wrong he was. The incident has given physiological testing a bad name ever since. Hall also advocated product testing as a part of pre testing. If those who saw the commercial felt the product was better than those who didn’t, you had an important measure of the commercial’s impact on product perceptions.

8.  Advertising is still an art, not a science. So said DDB’s Chairman, Keith Reinhard. He was introduced as one of the country’s most influential creatives, who had been invited to provide comments on research from the other side. He opened with the thought that modern advertising consists of a lot more than copy, so continued use of the phrase "copy testing" makes him think of research as something out of the last century. He went on to ask if we haven’t always known it is the emotional impact that counts. He agreed we need more than copy feedback, and he asked if we were doing enough to involve creatives in research. But he was concerned the interesting new models being considered might eventually lead to new rules, because the most effective advertising was often the advertising that broke the rules. He said the cash register was the real measure - placing himself firmly in the camp of behavioral researchers, rather than the attitudinal researchers that prevailed at this meeting.

9.  Two big tests showed online advertising works for package goods. Nielsen’s Homescan partnered with Yahoo to study the effects online advertising, by an impressive group of CPG firms, had on 19,000 households. All campaigns tested showed sales lifts ranging from 15% to 36%. A Rex Briggs (Marketing Evolution) study with MSN showed the optimal media mix for Jello included 5-6% spent online, and 4-6% online for CoffeeMate.

10.  Research needs to show how much value there is in embedded content: product placements and the like. Similarly, there is a great unmet need to determine the value of tie-ins like Olympic sponsorships. There is also a long way to go in measuring the value of PR. This was all from the convention’s concluding remarks by David Bell, an old boss of mine whose other claims to fame include being Chairman of the Board and CEO of The Interpublic Group of Companies, Past President of the 4A’s, and former CEO of Bozell Worldwide. He said research and ad agencies never needed each other more. This new head of one of the largest of agency holding companies also expressed concerns about the way holding companies had developed over the decades. They bought any firm that could help their clients and ended up with a remarkable assortment of assets. But he questioned why his own IPG owned things like a racetrack. He felt this old model for holding companies resulted in too much isolated expertise.

These are only highlights of things that caught my interest. Check www.TheARF.org for more details.

                                                                                                Don Bruzzone, May, 2004