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The sole purpose of advertising is to sell products. It has no other purpose. David Ogilvy, who must have himself won many awards at the Cannes said - "If it doesn't sell, it isn't creative".
But at the Cannes ad pageant, held every year, south of France, the ad folks elevate ads to an art form and worship at the altar of creativity. They applaud and award the narrative but ignore its salesmanship. For the hardcore creatives at the ad agency, Cannes is more important than the cart – the shopping cart.
The quality of advertisement creative is often judged by one of two methods. One approach is the ability of ads to win awards at one of the many ad pageants held across the world. No award is more coveted than those given out at the Cannes ad festival, held every year in the south of France. Here an eminent panel of judges decide the winners. And the party begins.
Marketers, who actually pay for the creation of these ads, however use another method. They depend on market research techniques to judge ad copy. The market research approach is to ask a set of people what they thought of the ad and if the ad in consideration motivated them to buy the product. While this method known as “copy tests” is certainly more objective, it is still error prone to some extent, because respondents differ between what they say and what they actually do.
This post attempts to seek an analytical solution to the measurement of ad effectiveness. For this to succeed, one should first seek to understand what criteria determine a good ad creative: In my opinion they are:
· Salesmanship -the ability to fill up shopping carts in the short run
· Memorability - the potential to sell into the future, even if the ads are turned off
· Persuasiveness – the capability to convert a prospect to a customer, as quickly as possible
· Synergy – the interaction of the ad creative to work with other media and to create even more sales and memorability
· Efficiency – to do all this cost effectively
But creative effectiveness is confounded by the media exposures behind it. Even a bad creative can sell, if repeated enough number of times till you are blue in the face. A great creative may be ineffective, if it is not backed by sufficient media weight.
Statistical methods that provide us a time varying beta for an input are best suited for this problem. The Kalman Filter comes to mind. By positing equations that govern how the ad works through time, in conjunction with media weights, and with other media, one is able to measure ad creative effectiveness, quite accurately. Very often these results closely match those of copy tests done by research agencies.
The next time your client's ad agency showcases the Cannes Awards it won, ask them the question - How many did this ad sell? They may not have an answer. But you will.
Data science offers a more precise guide – computing the price elasticity at a key SKU level can suddenly make this exercise a lot easier. While we still use judgement and intuition, now our gut is better informed and therefore the decisions are much better as they are based on hard data.
Many brands still depend only on media planning based on survey data ( BARC, Adex etc) and while this served the purpose about 20 years ago, in today’s scenario it is simply not good enough. Let me point out some deficiencies in the existing media planning process. For one even if the eyeballs estimated are correct, this does not mean that the “right” eyeballs are being targeted.
In conclusion, today’s brands especially the digital new age brands need to start building connects with the customer, beyond the transactional and also start looking at more robust brand building processes, irrespective of the media used.