The Insanity Of Traditional Creative Testing And How To Change Our Ways
“Insanity isn’t doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. Insanity is knowing it’s the wrong thing to do, but doing it anyway”.
This is how I often feel when thinking about traditional methods of testing the effectiveness of advertising.
Because this could get controversial, let’s start on solid ground.
Here’s something the majority of marketers believe: Emotionally charged advertising campaigns are more effective than persuasion or information conveying campaigns. Vocal champions of this belief include Robert Heath as well as Les Binet and Peter Field. For a more detailed summary take look at Patrick Tomasiewicz’s recent blog post.
Beyond the theory, the success of campaigns, such as Cadbury Dairy Milk’s “Gorilla” remind us that it’s possible to generate significant business effects when creating moments of joy rather than trying to persuade audiences of the benefits of a product — the campaign delivered an ROI of £4.88 for every £1 invested.
Phil Rumbol, the then Marketing Director at Cadbury, admits that despite having almost no chocolate featured in the ad, no explicit message and very low branding scores, he had a “belief and conviction it would’ve bee criminal if the UK public hadn’t seen that [“Gorilla” spot]”.
Had it not been for Rumbol’s conviction the campaign may never have seen the light of day as traditional creative testing didn’t highly rate it’s chances of success. But despite what we now know, may be “Gorilla” was an outlier. Maybe it’s the type of one off magic that can’t be replicated.
Maybe not. Take a look at Fig. 1. This compounds this issue of whether traditional testing accurately predicts the effects advertising. This data, taken from the IPA Effectiveness Awards, shows that across persuasion, cut through, brand linkage and message takeaway, the top performing ads produced fewer very large business effects than the worst performing ads.
If this is the case, shouldn’t agencies and clients look to update their creative effectiveness criteria from measures of information to measures of emotion? I think this creates at least enough of a case for a conversation.
Although there are research agencies that offer measurement of emotional reactions and importantly measure emotional reaction implicitly, this tends not to be the norm.
As an industry, if we believe in the power of emotion, we shouldn’t be so focused on the rational effects of advertising. Not only does it seem like an exercise in insanity, it could be killing truly effective work that would be criminal to leave on board room floors.
