Masked Advertising: In conducting recognition tests we block out or bleep all mentions of the name of the product so we can see how many remember who the advertisement was for. This is the most vital piece of information communicated by any advertisement.  Ads and commercials vary widely in their ability to get across the name of the advertiser.

As mentioned in the Recognition section, an accurate segregation of the sample into those who noticed the advertising and those who didn’t is critical for all the remaining steps in testing the impact of advertising. The first is this measuring of the ability of the ad or commercial to get the name across.  

Its importance is driven home by our annual syndicated study of Super Bowl commercials.   Almost every year we find Super Bowl commercials that have great stopping power, but are poorly branded.  Almost everyone finds them highly entertaining and can still recognize them a week after the game, but hardly anyone remembers who they were for.   How can a commercial like that be delivering the results the advertiser expects?   How can commercials like that get aired?

Both attention getting value and the ability to get the name across are well measured in recognition-based testing. They are among the most difficult characteristics to get a satisfying measure of when other techniques are used.

Almost all pretesting uses some form of forced exposure.  People pay more attention to the advertising than they would normally.  Awareness of what is being advertised is so artificially high questions about brand awareness are usually omitted.   In tracking studies conducted by telephone the key questions are usually of the form:

"Do you remember any recent advertising for Brand X?"

"Can you describe it?"

In that case, if you have poor results, you have no idea how to fix the problem because you don't know if the problem was a lack of stopping power, or poor branding.