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2 answers

I've been in advertising for several years.

Ad effectiveness is a very very complex topic. However, the net goal is to bring about the goal of the company (brand identity, the roll out of a new product, reestablishing or tweaking a soft impression of either the corporate or product image) for the LEAST net $. Measuring both the front end cost (how much the ad package "costs") and the back end cost (follow through of the campaign's wake for the company and sometimes the industry) can be measured in a 100 different ways. In my view, however, the best way to measure is to take into account AS MANY variables as possible, including all of the obvious variables like how the campaign will affect impressions and purchasing patterns for target markets, but also effects on future campaigns, market expectations, opportunities (or lost opportunities) for target market growth,etc.

At the end of the day, advertising effectiveness is about spending as little cash as possible to increase both short-term and long-term gains.

2007-02-09 08:09:35 · answer #1 · answered by evanbartlett 4 · 0 0

Ad effectiveness depends on the objective. Before doing any advertising one needs to have an objective- an ad is effective if you can say you have achieved that objective. Now that's not so helpful to say but it is the obvious first step that people often overlook- set a communications objective up front that is solid. That will drive what media you use (TV, print, radio, etc.) and how you measure your success.

For something like godaddy.com the objective is probably number of new registrations. That's pretty easy to measure and probably there was no research involved. Similarly, for direct response (informercials and mail order) you probably watch sales directly.

For consumer products, ad research usually focuses on measures like recall and persuasion. An effective ad would have at least normative (comparable to other ads in the same category) recall and persuasion. The norms are key- otherwise you don't know what a "good" or "bad" score really is. Beyond that, there are measures around message communications to see not only if they remember and believe you, but are they getting what you wanted them to get. Print and TV can be measured this way.

The big gray area is that many times ads need also to help build brand equity (connection to the brand) which takes time and is very hard to measure except over a long time. That might be measured by ongoing tracking studies that look at brand related measures (i.e. how the target thinks about the brand - cool, boring, old fashioned, premium, etc.).

But for many companies, where there just isn't the budget to test ads like this (@ $30k per commercial!!) you may have to measure it using one-on-one interviews with your target. You won't get recall and persuasion, but you will get a feel for whether it might be communicating the right idea. And that may have to do.

Once in-market it gets tricky. Nobody can really tell you precisely how well your media dollars are working for you (since you probably are doing many things to help your business). If money is no object, modeling companies can tease out what % of your sales change is due to your advertising. But it's also not 100% perfect. One time the biggest driver of sales was "other"- i.e. everything else going on in the market. (called Media Mix Modeling)

2007-02-10 09:04:43 · answer #2 · answered by QandAGuy 3 · 1 0

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