Two articles appeared in a recent edition of Campaign. One debated whether advertising recall was a necessary corollary of advertising effectiveness - and how difficult it was to create and then assess recall. The second article speculated on whether advertising research (pre-testing) was hindering the development of outstanding creative work.
The article on recall was essentially about theories on how advertising works: how, if at all, it is remembered, what it’s remembered for and how any of this impacts future opinion and behaviour. It was a short article but clearly illustrated the complexity of the issues involved in addressing how advertising works. And then there was the advertising research article.
If you got a ‘talked about’ ad through research you thought research was pretty useful. If your ad was given the thumbs down you thought it a block on creativity. If you ‘win’ you think research is good. ‘Lose’ and you think it is evil, inherently conservative and malicious.
There is a gap here. How can there be such erudite debate on the core question of how advertising works, but such playground arguments on advertising pre-testing?
Firstly, in many cases client and agency have never properly addressed the question of how they think their advertising will work. Or if they have, this level of strategy is not briefed to the researchers. By ‘work’ we mean an explanation of how they believe a piece of TV, print or online creative will influence people at consideration or purchase points. Briefing the researcher on ‘how we want our brand to be perceived’ is not the same.
Briefing that, for this advertising to work it needs to: ‘generate debate and controversy’, ‘make people feel unsettled about a product category’ or ‘recollect childhood memories of a brand’ gives research a means of assessment that can work beyond the immediate reaction to any stimulus material.
If you don’t have this level of briefing or insight going into the research and only the ‘we want to be seen as..’ element, the inherent Q&A, stimulus and response nature of research takes over. The questions ‘what do you think it is trying to say?’ and ‘do you like it?’ take over.
Get the answers ‘I don’t know’ and ‘No, I think its rubbish’ and as a researcher you have nowhere to go. The project has been set up on the basis of whether groups decipher the advertising correctly and like it. If they don’t, how can you possibly recommend that the client carries on with this route?
Engage any pre-testing research with the core questions of how you believe this advertising will work and the researcher has a much better chance of coming back with something interesting. Then it’s down to him or her. Good research requires a good researcher. And a good advertising researcher needs to know a lot about advertising – but they’re few and far between.
Firstly they need some awareness of the debates on how advertising works. This means you are more likely to ask ‘how do you think this works?’ at the briefing and hopefully set the research on a more interesting and productive course.
Secondly, you are more likely to ask further questions at briefing stage when the potential implications are understood. A campaign that is backed by a £10m spend is materially different from one with a £500k budget. Likewise a campaign using totally new executional techniques or media approaches is very different to an idea being expressed with already established executional tools. Trying to strip away budget and executional implications to ‘solely concentrate on the idea’ sounds worthy but is misleading and increases the inherent artificiality of research.
This is the final issue with advertising research; in most cases you are not really researching the ads. Advertising research is a hotchpotch of bits of polyboard, illustrations, words, animatics, photos and images. These seek to give people something that represents the advertising idea and execution but, in most cases, isn’t the actual thing. Even if they are finished pieces of advertising, the contrived setting for groups still makes their viewing artificial. There is always this danger of advertising being ‘lost in translation’ when it is researched.
There is little you can do about this other than being constantly aware of the problem and therefore modest and honest in your recommendations. As we know, it is often the executional elements in advertising that make it work, that are recalled and are remembered. But an honest researcher should be cognisant of the difficulties and bold enough to sometimes say ‘I don’t think you can really research or test this advertising’. You may be able to research the thinking behind the idea but this is a very late stage at which to be questioning the thinking.
In no other field of business, technological or scientific development would you proceed through an entire process and only ‘test’ at the end. In all other spheres of development, ideas are researched as part of the process so that you try to minimise the chances of a nasty surprise at the end. Surely advertising would benefit from following a similar pattern of using research throughout the process.
From all sides: client, agency, and researcher, better advertising research comes about when the focus is on the question of how the ad(s) will work and when research is integrated into the process. Left to the vagaries of ‘do you like it?’ type focus groups, more great ideas that could have worked will be lost - and more conventional ideas that don’t work will be made.
