Because digital media allow a much closer look at people’s exposure to advertising and what they do as a result, the efforts to determine which advertising sells product and which does not are getting more sophisticated. In 2006, Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart published a broad attempt to determine the effectiveness of advertising (A1; http://adage.com/ article?article_id=110937). In What Sticks, the authors examined thirty-six case studies of advertising from major U.S. advertisers. To their surprise they found that most of the ad- vertisers did not have clear criteria for advertising success, much less a clear idea of whether it was successful. In general they concluded that about 37 percent of advertising worked.
The earlier work of professor John Philip Jones was perhaps more convincing (A2; http://adage.com/article?article_id=84265). Jones collected data showing that there were measureable effects of advertising after just one exposure, thus challenging a long-held
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
—John Wanamaker, pioneer of the department store concept
50 CHAPTER 7 • Research: The Magic Ingredient in Effective Advertising
belief that to work, an advertisement had to be seen three times. In his book When Ads
Work, Jones went beyond what is reported in this Ad Age article.
One-Hit Or Miss: Is a Frequency of One Frequently Wrong?
One of the biggest and potentially costliest questions that advertisers must answer is how often to run their ads. Traditionally, it’s been an article of faith that more exposures to an advertising message are important and that repetition sells.
Surprisingly, Professor John Philip Jones argues that his research demonstrates that “all you need is a frequency of one” for effectiveness. This sounds enticing because, of course, advertisers would love to reduce their media expenditures by scaling way back on placements and your textbook outlines his reasoning.
But as the Ad Age article reveals, those decisions are complicated by a number of fac- tors that show the complexity of using and applying research. Here are some of the main points the author makes:
The product category is important. Jones’s research focused on “package goods brands” •
that include items that are consumable like beverages, food, shoes and other things that you use relatively quickly and must replace. Other products are durable or hard goods like cars, appliances, electronics and furniture that are used over time. Most people don’t need to be motivated to buy breakfast cereal, but advertising can nudge them into buying a certain kind of cereal. As the article points out, that’s different from attempt- ing to persuade someone that she needs a smart phone to replace her mobile AND she needs a Verizon iPhone. That would likely be a tougher sell and may require more ad exposures.
The product’s price is a factor. You’ll likely mull over a purchase that’s costly or riskier •
in some other way. For example, in buying a new sofa, you may be concerned about the cost and whether your purchase is fashionable or appropriate. Again, more and different kinds of advertising may be necessary.
The product’s complexity and/or the complexity of the advertising message is another •
element to take under consideration. Do the product’s features and benefits require a lot of explanation?
How memorable and effective are your ads? As you know from your own experience, •
some commercials are compelling and easy to remember. Others, not so much. What are your competitors up to? If you were to reduce your ad schedule, you’d need •
to keep an eye on how much they’re advertising. As you know, promotion doesn’t take place in a vacuum and it’s possible your messages could be lost among your competi- tors’ more frequent spots.
Based on two thousand U.S. households, Jones calculated that there was a difference in the purchase of seventy-eight brands between those people exposed to an ad and those not exposed to an ad. On average there were 24 percent more purchases of those brands when the household had likely been exposed to the ad. But when Jones broke the data into quintiles from the lowest differences to the highest differences, he truly shined light on the question of “waste.” For those brands in the highest quintile, there was a 90 percent in- crease from ad-exposed to non-ad-exposed households. In the fourth quintile there was a 30 percent increase. In the third quintile there was a 12 percent increase. But in the second quintile there was no difference; and in the first quintile, there was an 18 percent loss. So Jones concluded that 40 percent of advertising is wasted. It is interesting to see how closely this mirrors the What Sticks estimate.
New Research Methods 51
This is one of many examples of the power of research. In this instance, we’re looking at the question of how much advertising seems to be successful. But what about individual campaigns? It’s often suggested that research is most useful for three kinds of insights about individual campaigns:
1. The nature of the target market—what they want and expect, what the brand can do
for them, or what need it can fulfill.
2. The effectiveness of the advertisements created (an enterprise called copy testing). 3. Tracking how well sales and market shares are influenced by the ad campaign.
As we’ve noted, digital media have changed much about advertising research, although some aspects of it remain fundamental. Searching for information on potential audiences for a brand has become much simpler and faster with search engines. Testing what are called convenience samples of audience members (those who choose to respond, in con- trast to a random sample, which is far more representative of the audience) has become easy, quick, and inexpensive by inviting people to participate in online surveys. But the Internet has also created many new ways to do research, and Ad Age covers these innova- tions and trends. We take a look at some of them here.