From the Advertising Research Foundation Week of Workshops

2.  Many storyboards can be tested better, faster, and cheaper online. Jack Bookbinder of Kaiser Permanente and I described an experiment to test storyboards online instead of in focus groups. The results showed when the execution, message and strategy are similar; the larger samples can show subtle differences between the storyboards in their ability to get across the message. The emotional component was delivered and measured as well as in other test methods. Verbatim comments were full and insightful. The sample proved representative in key measures. And the cost for over 1000 online respondents was equivalent to the cost of about 4 focus groups. The main thing Jack found missing were the M&Ms. The improvements made possible by doing it online held promise of making one of the most common and controversial procedures in advertising research a little less controversial.

3.  John Philip Jones showed evidence of advertising’s long-term contribution to profits. This comes from the man who many of us feel made the most significant contribution to advertising research in decades when he showed it is the first exposure to new advertising that has the biggest effect. He cited six types of evidence of long term profitability: increased penetration, greater purchase frequency, less price elasticity, higher prices, and less advertising per unit sold, combined with greater impact from each dollar spent on advertising. The effect on sales volume may not be as great as for price promotions, but he said price promotions seldom boost profits, they usually reduce them. He felt this left advertising as the best marketing tool available for improving long-term profits. But he added that even though these hold true as generalities, advertising’s success record is spotty. Too much advertising is wasted. More attention needs to be given to improving the quality of advertising because he has found sales are extremely sensitive to differences in creative quality.

4.  Testing online campaigns with cookies and quintile analysis was described by Dynamic Logic’s Molly Hislop. The cookies they plant let them know the respondent saw the page with the ad. Then they measure its impact four ways: 1.)brand name awareness, where entertainment advertising enjoyed the highest lift among those who saw its online advertising; 2.)message communication, where auto advertising produced the highest scores; 3.) favorable attitudes toward the product, where entertainment again performed best; and 4.) purchase intent, where travel advertising got the top scores. Looking at the results by quintiles shows if the advertising has had at least some effect on everyone. If not, the top quintile can provide the basis for identifying the types that were affected.

7.  Additional pretesting questions provide evidence of an ad’s contribution to Brand Equity. Dave Walker from Ipsos-ASI told how it combined their learning from Brand Equity research and "Copytesting". (Those of us who prefer a word that indicates we test the whole ad, have to forgive them, they are from the old country.) They added their "Brand Health" questions to their "Next*TV" pretests and found commercials that held promise of performing well in their traditional pretest measures also showed a greater "lift" in their measures of brand equity.

8.  How to sell people on changing the course of their life. This was a case history of the Ogilvy Award winning campaign for the US Navy presented by David Hudson of Campbell-Ewald. He described a variety of research that showed those most likely to consider the military are active, fun-loving, concerned about the future, looking for vocational and leadership skills, and seeking respect from friends and family. This lead to the campaign’s basic quality of life statement: "I want to be the very best at whatever I set out to do with my life." Given the opportunities offered by the Navy, this led to the basic positioning statement: "The Navy is the hands-on adventure which will accelerate me to my highest level of achievement."

9.  A government campaign helps offset the health effects of fast food advertising. Claudia Ponder, Lawrence & Ponder Ideaworks, and Barbara Foster, Market Research Associates discussed the campaign conducted for the past five years by an agency of the Calif. Dept. of Health Services. While the health problems associated with high fat, low fiber diets are widely recognized by those who study the problem; they found the public showed little concern, particularly those with lower income. They used public service spots to get across the need to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables every day, augmented by out-of-home media, all targeted to low income mothers where the need was the greatest. The perception that fresh fruits and vegetables take more time and effort to prepare was one of the obstacles to be overcome. After five years the campaign reached an 83% awareness level.

10.  Rx Direct to Consumer advertising effects both behavior and attitudes. Doug Russell of Y&R also described the combining of previous measures of brand assets and ad tracking. In one example it showed why the allergy medicine that advertises the most (Claritin) is losing share to Flonase and Allegra. They cut advertising because it will soon become an over-the-counter brand. Differentiation has declined leading to a loss in share.

10a.  Erwin Ephorn outlined dangers from the all too common "targeting errors". He started by defining the two types of error that can occur from the typical knee-jerk establishment of target groups in terms of gender and age: 1) the number of people outside the age/sex category that buy the product, and 2) the number of people in the age/sex target that do not use the product. His simple, clear exposition of this key problem that can end up reducing, instead of improving, the efficiency of advertising, reinforced his position among those of us who consider him one of the most influential thinkers in the field. His solution? Use one more universally available criteria, area, to see if you can’t define a target that indexes significantly higher than 100 – showing you have actually found groups where the concentration of prospects is high enough to improve the efficiency of your advertising.

Don Bruzzone, October 11, 2002