Testing Times

Pre-testing the effectiveness of ad campaigns should be high on the agenda of marketers, according to IPC Prospector’s ad marketing manager, James Papworth, who explains the importance of trial runs in the production of promotional activity…

What was the last thing you bought without trying it out first? A new variety of ready-meal perhaps, or a pair of socks, maybe a kebab after a night on-the-tiles?

Whatever it was, the chances are it was a small purchase. Low in price, easily replaceable with a substitute and with little financial or emotional distress if you actually just ‘binned’ it.

Moving up a notch on both those risk factors now and how about a new pair of jeans? They’re not cheap, it’s a hassle to take them back if you have to and there’s the emotional pitfall that they may just… make your bum look big.

In order to avoid a return trip to the shops, or worse still, to the gym, you’d probably do what we’d all probably do. You’d test them out before buying them and try them on.

A fifty quid pair of jeans can generate over an hour of uhmming and ahhring before any money actually changes hands. And even then, we still have the option of taking them back.

Moving up several notches now to an advertising campaign. With advertising you are buying time – the time between two halves of Coronation Street, the gap between the news and Danny Baker, the moment it takes to glance over a page and decide if, at that time, there’s something on it worth reading.

Time only goes forward so, unlike your jeans you can’t take it back. It also costs more than fifty quid.

Odd then that while the average fifty quid pair of, refundable, jeans is pre-tested before purchasing, many advertising campaigns are not.

To be fair some media are blighted by this situation more than others. TV for example seems to do well with a round 70% of commercials being creatively pre-tested to some extent before airing.

An understandable position given that TV is a most public and pricey media. The risk of embarrassment is high and the cost of failure, expensive.

But what about advertising in other media, magazines for example? 30% of magazine campaigns are pre-tested before running and yet a media pound spent in magazines is a media pound spent. Surely it is worth interrogating as thoroughly as any other before being spent.

Arguably, around £Â˝ billion of magazine advertising runs, and the medium critiqued on its performance, without any objective testing of how the creative actually performs in front of its audience.

Whether advertisers pre-test their creative work prior to spending hundreds of thousands of pounds behind it is their own issue. However, not testing it can lead to incorrect conclusions about the performance of particular media for particular purposes and significantly influence budget allocation.

Consider these two scenarios, very similar in structure but with considerably different outcomes.

Firstly, a regular TV advertiser runs a campaign with new creative. It quickly becomes apparent that this campaign is delivering fewer responses/awareness/sales than usual. A ‘heads up’ call goes to the agency who, once the consolidated ratings are in, notice that tvrs for this advert are lower than the surrounding minutes – yikes, the creative isn’t performing and customers are actively avoiding the advert.

Maybe the creative gets changed, maybe tvrs increase and maybe responses/ awareness/sales climb. What doesn’t happen is a critical examination of TV as a suitable vehicle for this brand/product/offer.

Now consider the same scenario in magazines, with an advertiser running new creative.

Firstly, there are no advert tvrs being recorded on a minute-by-minute basis. If a reader doesn’t like an advert, they skip it and go to the next page. The advertiser may have lost them as a customer but they are still counted by NRS a as reader – not as an advert avoider.

This keeps the readership figure up but there’s no indication that the advert may be underperforming. Ad skipping is not factored into the campaign evaluation which then goes on to suggest a poorer than usual cost per response/awareness/sale.

With little to suggest the creative element was at fault, and vociferous defenders of that creative close at hand, it is far more likely that the medium will carry the can, resulting in a critical examination of magazines as a suitable vehicle for this brand/product/offer.

Several studies (IPC AdTrack, John Philp Jones STAS, PPA Proof or Performance, and PPA Magazines Uncovered 2005 among them) have proven that magazine advertising, if done right, can be more cost effective at delivering sales than TV. Too often perhaps the ‘if done right’ bit is left almost to luck.

David Ogilvy said, “never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving”. If creative testing is incorporated often enough, advertisers soon discover what makes a better advert to fill that moment of time they are buying.

Very soon best practice replaces good luck and, as golfer Ben Hogan put it “the funny thing is, the more I practice, the luckier I get”.