The Best Measure of Advertising Effectiveness

Audience measurements are only part of the story when assessing the effectiveness of media to carry and deliver advertising messages to an audience. The important thing is that the advertisements are noticed by the target audience. Consumers mentally tune in and out of TV, radio, newspapers and magazines as they watch, listen to or read them. Depending on the environment around the advertisement, the creativeness of the advertisement and the relevance of the message, consumers may or may not recognise having seen any given advertisement - because they did not notice it at the time.

Even if an advertisement is ideally placed to be noticed, people may not recognise it because the creative left no mark in the memory, or perhaps the product or service was of no interest to the consumer.

Advertisements that catch the attention of consumers in a relevant and appealing way - work!

McNair Ingenuity Research offer a range of advertising effectiveness measurements that zoom-in on the complexities to see if the advertising worked - with the right people, and in the right way.

STARCH is one such measurement, most commonly applying to print media - newspaper and magazine advertisements.

Aided Recall - A realistic measure

Today the mass of advertising messages that each person receives daily makes it useless to ask people what advertising they recall spontaneously - even by product category. McNair Ingenuity Research always recommend prompting respondents with descriptions of advertisements or actual advertisements in order to measure whether they recall seeing them before. Aids can be colour cards, video, audio or digital clips of commercials, or in the case of most print media starch surveys, respondents look through complete copies of the newspaper or magazine in question.

Advertising Themes

Many campaigns carry themes across a range of creative executions. Measuring recall and effectiveness of these is very useful, partly because it measures the effectiveness of the theme, and also because respondents can often remember the pervasive theme, even if they can't recall a specific execution of the advertisement.

Measuring Advertising Cut-Through

There are many additional measurements of advertising effectiveness that are particularly effective:

• Relevance - People need to think that the advertising is speaking to them - or else it glosses over them; and
• Likeability - Advertising needs to leave a positive association in the mind of the consumer - negative associations may achieve a good `recall' score, but they do not drive sales!

Audience Segmentation

STARCH surveys also allow for the results to be segmented by demographic or product usage segments, so you can see whether the creative execution or placement is working more effectively with different consumer groups.