Ensuring your advertisement resonates with your audience with message testing



Those involved in the advertising industry would agree on one fact: message testing is important to running successful ad campaigns. While methods differ, the core fact that guaranteeing your ad resonates with the intended audience is crucial to ensuring high ROI. Data-driven evidence is the key to justifying promoting any ad campaign.
According to the British Market Research Association, “client spend on ad development and pre-testing research grew by nearly 40% between 1998 and 2001.” Clearly empirical value is found in testing effectiveness. Companies differ on how they decide to run pre and post campaign message testing. Whether qualitiative or quantitative, the intentions are all the same: to measure how effective an ad is in communicating the message to the intended audience.
For pre-ad campaign message testing, most companies choose a more qualitative approach, weighing how individuals felt and reacted to different copies of the same ad campaign. Methods of qualitative research include: focus groups, personal interviews, or spontaneous recall tests. One company in particular — Vencore Messaging Solutions, previously PhaseOne — employs their long-tested technology to message test without ever talking to consumers by using knowledge about human behavior, anthropology, education and entertainment to predict how a targeted audience will respond to an advertisement.
Conversely, two quantitative message testing methods are binary and dial message testing. One of the leaders in binary message testing is G2 analytics. After being exposed to any given ad, the method of binary message testing allows respondents to either agree, disagree or remain neutral on a topic. This method is employed in situations that value understanding how individuals will react to the advertisement to offer insight to clients to target them to either earn more votes or make more sales.
Another method of quantitative testing is dial message testing. A market leader in this arena is ComScore. Felix Angelastro, the Director of Business Development at ComScore, explained the difference between ComScore and their compeitors, hinging on the idea of creative evaluation, or optimizing creative.
“In the past, people were only interested in optimizing placement; pollsters were used before and during the campaign to survey consumers,” said Angelastro. “The difference with ComScore is that we use microscales (1–99) which give a more in-depth and sensitive analysis over a broader range of topics. In other words, with ComScore you get a wider range in your read of measurement capabilities.”
Typically, ComScore sends a survey of 10–18 questions to tested consumers to understand how they felt about the advertisement. From here, they report the data back to client and also offer consultations on what the data means and how to incorporate it back into the ad campaign.
The various means of message testing relate to different potential outcomes of ad campaigns, the main ones being recall, persuasion, response or communicating benefits. They are all relatively self explanatory, but the differences between them explain why different methods of ad testing are more effective in measuring success.
Measuring effectiveness of a recall ad tests what parts of the ad the viewers remember — specifically if there was one intended message to take away. A campaign aimed to persuade an audience is considered a success if a viewer’s opinion shifted from before to after experiencing the ad. An ad looking to incite a response is successful if action was taken after the individual is exposed to the ad, for example if they decide to sign a petition. Finally, in looking to communicate benefits, the ad is considered a success if the consumer has a higher view of the product than they did before, like understanding the difference in speed capabilities between an Apple and Dell computer.
Understanding different methods of testing is important to make informed decisions on how to test. However, equally important is weighing the goals of your ad campaign to ensure the metrics reported back truly reflect the desired outcome.
JC Medici, an individual long involved in the advertising and data-driven world, has worked for companies from Rocket Fuel, to L2, to Throtle. best explains the necessary questions that must be asked: “You have to ask: what does the end look like? What does success look like? What do you tell your client you achieved? Then work backwards from there.”
For a campaign aiming to persuade an audience, simply getting a customer to a website for a few seconds cannot be reported as a success. Going in with an established outcome of the campaign is the only way to verify you achieved what you wanted to.
“Data is a tool, it’s only one part of an overall strategy,” said Medici. “You make plans for your media campaign based on various factors. Media today is too sophisticated to put out one blanket statement; there is too much data, too many analytics for a blanket statement of success.”
To recap, message testing is important in most ad campaigns. It offers data-backed evidence to justify spending a large fraction of a budget on a single advertisement. However, methods of ad testing differ, and all options should be considered based on the anticipated outcome of the campaign. As measurement capabilities become increasingly sophisticated, advertisers can no longer report that their campaign was a success based solely on a number of clicks on an ad. Understanding how consumers truly feel about and discuss an advertisement is at the core of running an effective, successful campaign.
