ADV 210 Notes, Fall 2010

430 Chapter 19 Evaluation of Effectiveness WEB REVIEW QUESTIONS 1. What are the reasons why advertisers conduct evaluations of their advertising and marketing communication programs? The first reason is that the stakes in making an advertising misstep are high. The second reason is advertising optimization: that means reducing risk by testing, analyzing, tracking performance, and making changes where possible to increase the performance of the advertising. The third reason is to learn what works and what doesn’t—in other words, to identify best practices so a brand’s advertising continues to improve. 2. This chapter says that evaluation is most useful when based on a model of advertising response. Why is that so? According to research professionals at Ipsos, the largest U.S. provider of advertising pretesting, “Ads work best when they engage viewers’ interest, when consumers enjoy watching them, when they are relevant, and when they tell their story in a unique and interesting way.” Those are some of the dimensions of effectiveness, but there are others that also are important as we know from Chapter 4. Good evaluation plans, and the objectives found in them, are based on a model of human response to an advertisement—an idea about how advertising works. So the best starting point in setting objectives is a model that identifies key effects and guides their evaluation, which is what we developed with our Facets Model in Chapter 4. Table 19.1 groups the key factors of effectiveness and then matches them to the types of research questions that advertisers can use to determine effectiveness. 3. Give one research question for each of the six main effects from the Facets Model of advertising effectiveness. Table 19.1 will be a good tool for the students to use in answering this question. 4. What are norms and how are they used in advertising evaluation? Copytesting companies have different specialties focusing on different effectiveness dimensions. The most successful of these companies have conducted enough tests that they have developed norms for common product categories. After they pretest an Chapter 19: Evaluation of Effectiveness 431 ad, they are able to compare its score with others that reflect how comparable ads perform on the factors they test. Norms allow the advertiser to tell whether a particular advertisement is above or below the average for the brand or its product category. Without norms, the advertiser would not know whether a score was good or bad. 5. What is the difference between concept testing and pretesting? Research in concept testing compares the effectiveness of various creative ideas (big idea). This testing often relies on a key concept card, which is an artist’s drawing of the visual idea with a sentence underneath that captures the essence of the idea. Pretesting helps marketers make the final go/no-go decisions about finished or nearly finished ads. Pretesting differs from concept testing or message strategy research, which reveals the strengths and weaknesses of different versions of a concept or approach as marketers develop them. Pretesting assesses the strength of the finished message and predicts how well it will perform. 6. Why are diagnostic research methods becoming more important to advertisers? Many advertisers and agencies are moving away from copytesting methods that rely on single scores to evaluate an ad and turning to diagnostic research methods that are more focused on diagnosing strengths and weaknesses. They believe an advertisement is too complex to be reduced to one factor and one simple score. 7. What is a tracking study and how is it used? Studies that follow the purchase activity of a specific consumer or group of consumers during a specified period of time are tracking studies. These studies combine conventional marketing research data with information on marketing communication spending and provide a more complete view of the market. Researchers use market tracking for both concurrent testing and posttesting. It may serve two basic objectives: to show how the marketer’s product sales or market share compares with the competition after implementing some marketing communication and to conduct reassessment—that is, to help the marketer understand how the market responds to changes made in the marketing communication strategy. Tracking studies evaluate copy and media against changes in sales. 8. What is a test market and how is it used? Part 5: Integration and Evaluation 432 A test market might serve to test product variations, as well as elements of a finished ad, a campaign, or a media mix in two or more potential markets. In a typical test market, one or more of the test cities serve as controls while the others are the test. In the control markets the researcher can either run no advertising or continue to run the old ad. The new ad is used in the test cities. Before, during, and after running the advertising, marketers compare sales results in the test cities by checking inventories in selected stores representative of the target market. 9. Explain how memory tests are used in posttesting. Memory tests are based on the assumption that an advertisement leaves a mental residue with the person who has been exposed to it. One way to measure an advertisement’s effectiveness, then, is to contact consumers who saw the ad and find out what they remember. Memory tests fall into two major groups: recall tests and recognition tests. One way to measure memory is to show the advertisement to people and ask them whether they remember having seen it before. This kind of test is called a recognition test. In a recall test, respondents who have read the magazine are asked to report what advertisements or brands they remember seeing. 10. When we say persuasion test, what are we referring to? Another evaluative research technique is a persuasion test or attitude change test. The basic format is to ask consumers how likely they are to buy a specific brand. Next, they are exposed to an advertisement for that brand usually as part of a collection of brands. After exposure, researchers again ask them what they intend to purchase. The researcher analyzes the results to determine whether intention to buy has increased as a result of exposure to the advertisement. This test is sometimes referred to as an intend-to-buy or motivation test. The validity of a persuasion test depends in part on whether participants in the experiment represent a good sample of the prospects the advertiser is trying to reach. 11. Explain how in-market tests work. Studies that follow the purchase activity of a specific consumer or group of consumers during a specified period are tracking studies. These in-market studies combine conventional marketing research data with information on marketing communication spending and provide a more complete view of the market. Researchers use market tracking for both concurrent testing and posttesting. It may serve two basic objectives: to show how the marketer’s product sales or market share compares with the competition after implementing some marketing communication Chapter 19: Evaluation of Effectiveness 433 and to conduct reassessment—that is, to help the marketer understand how the market responds to changes made in the marketing communication strategy. 12. What is single-source research and how does scanner data relate to it? Thanks to scanners, combined with computer technology and data and the use of electronic media, researchers are closer to showing a causal relationship between advertising and sales because of single-source research. Single-source research companies arrange to control the television signal of a community’s households. The company divides the households into equivalent matched groups. It then sends advertisements to one group but not to the other and collects exact records of what every household purchases. This information is collected through the scanners found at the supermarket cash register. Because advertising is the only manipulated variable, the method permits an unambiguous reading of cause and effect. The data collected in this way are known as single-source data because advertising and product purchasing data come from the same source. Although fairly expensive, single-source data can produce exceptionally dependable results. However, the method usually requires more than six months to produce usable results. Critics also say that single-source research is better for short-term immediate sales effects and doesn’t capture very well other brand-building effects. 13. What does media optimization mean? Ultimately, the biggest challenge in media planning is accountability. Advertisers want to know their dollars are being spent in the most efficient way and for the greatest impact. You may remember from Chapter 11 that media planners operate with computer media optimization models of media performance that they use in making decisions about media selection, scheduling, and weights (amount of budget). Models are always theoretical, so one result of post-evaluation is that the actual performance of a plan can be compared with the results projected by the media planner’s model. The goal in testing media planning is always to optimize the budget—to get the most impact possible with the least expenditure of money. That is the critical finding derived from the comparison of performance with projections. In addition to meeting the reach and frequency objectives, was the media plan efficient? 14. What is wearout and why is that a critical media planning consideration? Wearout is the point where the advertising gets tired and there is no response or less response than at the launch. This is also the point where recall stabilizes or declines and irritation levels increase because people are tired of hearing or seeing the same ad replayed. Based on these factors, an advertiser may choose to stop the ad or change the campaign.