Editor’s note: Jeri Smith is president and CEO of Communicus Inc., a Tucson, Ariz., research firm.
Advertising research is evolving right before our eyes, perhaps more rapidly than ever before. New technologies are emerging, offering exciting ways to explore, explain and quantify how advertising works. Researchers are using brainwave and facial coding analyses to gain insights into how consumers respond emotionally to ads. Knowing whether certain consumers have been exposed to online ads, test/control cell research can be implemented to see if an exposure produces a bump in brand metrics. Increasingly sophisticated marketing mix and attribution modeling approaches better connect advertising to sales.
Amidst all of this, are market researchers being led by the technology, rather than leading the process? If we allow the capabilities to define how we measure performance, we could end up in a place we don’t want to be, causing harm to the brands that we mean to support. By making these new technologies the primary tools that we use to understand advertising performance, we may be unintentionally producing serious consequences.
1. An increased focus on diagnosing the performance of individual ad executions will lead us away from providing insights into how all of a brand’s communication pieces work together to build the brand and motivate consumers to act.
The effect of the TV commercial, or of any one digital ad, is beside the point. The real point is to understand how it all works together to accomplish the brand’s objectives. Research that focuses on individual elements within the plan, and that does not study the amplification effects of cross-platform initiatives, fails to provide the types of robust insights that can help advertisers to build effective cross-platform campaigns. Consumers don’t see ads in silos, and persuasion doesn’t occur in a siloed environment, so we need to climb out of the individual ad silos and start analyzing campaigns.
2. Judging the in-market effects of advertising solely on the basis of the behavior that can be connected to the media investment cannot help but encourage the development of ads that motivate short-term behavior. However, will this be at the expense of building the brand for the longer term?
The goal of most advertising is to generate sales, and advertising expenditures are justified by the ROI they achieve. So, it is appropriate to judge advertising on the basis of marketing mix and attribution models that focus on this. But if we don’t at least look at the advertising’s impact on intermediary dynamics like brand values and brand love, we lose sight of the importance of advertising as a way to maintain or build these factors.
3. Focusing on results that are attained by a given media exposure or media investment invariably creates an environment in which the answer to how to make the advertising work harder is to manipulate the media plan. This takes our attention away from the piece that we know accounts for 75 percent or more of the success of advertising – the creative.
While marketing mix and attribution modeling often pay lip service to the impact of the creative, there’s little focus on how changing the creative can change the ROI. Typically, discussions revolve around how flighting the media differently or changing the mix of :15s, :30s or the digital buy could improve results. It may be easier for marketers to think about redistributing the money than to contemplate producing new ads but research that provides clear measures on the performance of the actual creative content has the ability to bring the focus back to where it rightly belongs.
The researcher who allows the methodology to define the questions that are answered is likely to provide answers to the wrong questions, or at best, to an incomplete set of questions. We need to think about how advertising works or should work, and then employ the research tools that will answer these questions.
Researchers know a lot about how advertising works, much of which is supported by the recent ARF study, How Advertising Works Today. ARF findings support the fact that multi-platform campaigns work but that the creative should be optimized across platforms. Advertising has an important role in building brands that may not be reflected in short-term ROI. Advertising works by generating awareness, familiarity and desire. Many consumers won’t go out and buy a BMW or a Lexus on the basis of the ads they see this week or even this year, but if they decide, based on advertising, that this is the car for them, then advertising has worked. Likewise, with shorter decision cycles, a deal-focused ad might generate an immediate purchase but advertising that provides a reason to believe that the brand is better might generate better equity and long-term ROI.
As research and insights professionals, it is up to us to ensure that the research we provide produces the kinds of insights that make advertising better. Let’s make sure that we’re asking the right questions, not just delivering the answers that the in-vogue research methodologies can supply. After all, as advertising researchers, our role is to serve the needs of advertisers –  and ultimately of brands – not just to bring new technologies into the conversation.