Creating Better Advertising
Given all of these barriers to better advertising, how can a client, agency, and research company work together to create more effective advertising?
The client must craft a sound strategy for its brand, based on facts, not wishful thinking and self-delusion. The client must carefully define the role of advertising in the marketing plan and set precise communication objectives for the advertising. What exactly does the client want the advertising to convey, to accomplish? Agencies are too often asked to create advertising in an informational vacuum. Agencies are not miracle workers. Once strategy and positioning alternatives are identified and tested, the strategy should be locked down—and rarely changed thereafter.
As creative executions are developed against the strategy, each execution should be pretested among members of the target audience. (“Pretesting” refers to testing advertising before it is aired and/ or before final production. When the term “testing” is used in this article, it is a shorthand term for “pretesting.”) The greater the number of executions tested, the more likely it is that great advertising will emerge. Testing the creative provides a reliable feedback loop that helps agency and client alike become smarter over time. Once a conceptual family of commercials is identified as the optimal campaign of the future, then the campaign should be locked down. Long-term continuity of an advertising message is essential to maximizing effectiveness.
Use the same testing system consistently. There is no perfect advertising testing system. Some are better than others, but any system will help improve your advertising. The secret is to use one system over and over, so that everyone (client, agency, and researchers) learns how to interpret the testing results for the category and the specific brand.
If budget permits, test the advertising at an early stage in the creative process (i.e., the “storyboard” or “animatic” stage) and also test at the finished commercial stage. Earlystage testing allows rough commercials to be tweaked and fine-tuned before you spend the big dollars on final production. Early-stage testing tends to be highly predictive of finished commercial scores, but not always. Testing the finished commercials gives you extra assurance that your advertising is “on strategy” and working.
Build your own “action standards” over time. As you test every execution, you will begin to learn what works and what doesn’t work. Think of the testing company’s norms as very crude, rough indicators to help you get started with a testing program. But, as quickly as possible, develop your own norms for your category and your brand (yes, all of the advertising effectiveness measures vary by product category and brand). Long-term, what you are searching for are not norms, but action standards (that is, the knowledge that certain advertising testing scores will translate into actual sales increases).
Use a mathematical model to derive an overall score for each execution. It doesn’t matter that an ad has great persuasion if it does not register the brand name. It doesn’t matter that an ad registers the brand name if no one will notice the commercial itself. It doesn’t matter that an ad increases short-term purchase interest if it will damage the brand’s quality reputation over time. So all of the key variables must be put together intelligently to come up with a composite or overall measure of advertising effectiveness.
Use the testing results as a guide or as an indicator, but do not become a slave to the mathematical model. Read all of the open-ended questions carefully. Make sure you really understand the underlying reasons. Base your decisions on this comprehensive assessment of the results, and leave yourself some wiggle room. No model or system can anticipate every marketing situation or give a 100% perfect solution every time. Informed human judgment remains important.
Clients and agencies need to accept that “continuous improvement” of the advertising is an important goal. This means that every execution is tested and tweaked based on scientific evidence from the target audience. We are not talking about changing the strategy or changing the campaign, but making sure that every execution is “on strategy” and working as hard as possible.
The ultimate goal of testing is an advertising success formula that works. That is, the goal of advertising creative development, and the goal of advertising testing, is to identify the elements/ ideas essential to advertising effectiveness, and then to make sure that those elements/ ideas are consistently communicated by all advertising executions.
The Power of Advertising
We believe in the power of advertising, based on thousands of studies in our archives. Advertising has the power to persuade, the power to influence the mind, and the power to shape destiny. It has the power to change markets and improve profit margins. Advertising has short-term power (conveying new information, building awareness, enhancing credibility, etc.) and long-term power (conveying brand image, attaching emotional values to the brand, building positive reputation, etc.).
The great power of advertising is seldom achieved in practice, but we can’t give up. The potential and the promise are too great. The companies that master the creative guidance and the testing systems to consistently develop and deploy great advertising will own the future and the fortunes that go with it. Great advertising is a cloak of invincibility.
