Advertising Research: Testing various types of Advertisements!
Research can be conducted to optimise advertisements for any medium: radio, television, print (magazine, newspaper or direct mail), outdoor billboard (highway, bus, or train), or Internet. Different methods would be applied to gather the necessary data appropriately.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
There are primarily two broad types of advertising research viz. Pre-testing and Post-testing. Pretesting is testing the advertisement before running it so that the likelihood of preparing most effective ads, by allowing an opportunity to detect and eliminate weaknesses or flaws increases. Post-testing is done after the advertisement is run on the media. This is more expensive and elaborate but most realistic as well because the advertisements are tested in real life setting.
In another way of advertisement research can be classified into two types of research, customised and syndicated. Customised research is conducted for a specific client to address that client’s needs. Only that client has access to the results of the research. Syndicated research is a single research study conducted by a research company with its results available, for sale, to multiple companies.
Pre-testing:
Pre-testing, also known as copy testing is a form of customised research that predicts in-market performance of an ad, before it airs, by analysing audience levels of attention, brand linkage, motivation, entertainment, and communication, as well as breaking down the ad’s Flow of Attention and Flow of Emotion. (Young) Pre-testing is also used on ads still in rough form – e.g., animatics or ripomatics. Pretesting is also used to identify weak spots within an ad to improve performance, to more effectively edit 60’s to 30’s or 30’s to 15’s, to select images from the spot to use in an integrated campaign’s print ad, to pull out the key moments for use in ad tracking, and to identify branding moments.
Pre-testing thus is undertaken to:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
i. Establish whether the advert ‘says’ what it was intended to
ii. Assess the likelihood of getting a response from the reader
