What are the elements of advertising research?

Answer 1

Advertising research is a specialized form of marketing research conducted to improve the efficiency of advertising.

This type of research allows companies and advertising agencies to evaluate many advertising creative concepts at different stages before production in order to identify a winning concept and prevent the investment of many man-hours and production resources in ineffective advertisements. This kind of research can also be used at the early stages of Web site development when the concept of the graphic design for the home page is emerging.

Benefits of Advertising Research

Asses an ad's ability to create awareness, generate leads, and increase conversion

Measure how effective different ads are at drawing attention, build brand image, elicit emotion, communicate a message, etc.

Pinpoint weak elements within an ad and how to improve its performance

Identify elements that can be part of an integrated ad campaign using different media

Provide a framework for the creative/design team, allowing them to create effective ads

Allow to explore different creative concepts before production

Indicate which creative elements and content appeal to different target segments

Types of advertising research

There are two types of research, customized and syndicated. Customized 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-market research can be conducted to optimize 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. Post-testing is conducted after the advertising, either a single ad or an entire multimedia campaign has been run in-market. The focus is on what the advertising has done for the brand, for example increasing brand awareness, trial, frequency of purchasing.

Pre-testing

Pre-testing, also known as copy testing, is a specialized field of marketing research that determines an ad's effectiveness based on consumer responses, feedback, and behavior.

Campaign pre-testing

A new area of pre-testing driven by the realization that what works on TV does not necessarily translate in other media. Greater budgets allocated to digital media in particular have driven the need for campaign pre-testing. The addition of a media planning tool to this testing approach allows advertisers to test the whole campaign, creative and media, and measures the synergies expected with an integrated campaign.

Post-testing

Post-testing/Tracking studies provide either periodic or continuous in-market research monitoring a brand's performance, including brand awareness, brand preference, product usage and attitudes. Some post-testing approaches simply track changes over time, while others use various methods to quantify the specific changes produced by advertising-either the campaign as a whole or by the different media utilized.

Overall, advertisers use post-testing to plan future advertising campaigns, so the approaches that provide the most detailed information on the accomplishments of the campaign are most valued. The two types of campaign post-testing that have achieved the greatest use among major advertisers include continuous tracking, in which changes in advertising spending are correlated with changes in brand awareness, and longitudinal studies, in which the same group of respondents are tracked over time. With the longitudinal approach, it is possible to go beyond brand awareness, and to isolate the campaign's impact on specific behavioral and perceptual dimensions, and to isolate campaign impact by medium.