Advertising Research - Tracking Studies
Advertising Research - Tracking Studies
When a campaign is running its impact is often monitored via a tracking study. Periodic sampling of the target audience provides a time trend of measures of interest. The purpose is to evaluate and reassess the advertising campaign, and perhaps also to understand why it is or is not working. Among the measures that are often traced are advertisement awareness, awareness of elements of the advertisement, brand awareness, beliefs about brand attributes, brand image, occasions of use, and brand preference. Of particular interest is knowing how the campaign is affecting the brand as opposed to how the advertisement is communicating.
Figure 23-5 shows the tracking of an advertising campaign directed at children for a beverage product.16 Personal interviews were held with children from 6 to 12 years old. They were shown visual stimuli such as pictures of brand packaging or line drawings of advertising characters. The mostly open-ended questions were consistently coded over five years. The interest was in the "main character," who was the personification of the brand and playback of the "story" of the advertising, the main creative element.
16Douglas F. Haley, "Advertising Tracking Studies: Packaged-Goods Case Histories," Journal of Advertising Research, 25 (February/March 1985), 45-50.
The successful campaign of year one was expanded with additional executions, which apparently did not have comparable impact. The disappointing results of year two led to a fresh round of copy development aimed at making it more modern and relevant for kids. However, the decline continued in year three. An analysis of verbatim playback suggested that the main character's actions were too predictable. As a result, new ads were developed, which placed the character in a more heroic role—rescuing children in adventurous situations. In year four the main character measure turned up. For the next season the campaign used situations from a child's real life in an attempt to make the advertising more relevant. The result in year five was a dramatic increase in recall of the central creative element and an important increase in two other measures. The tracking program provided, in this case, actionable information over time allowing the advertising to be adjusted around the same theme and become more effective.
The TEC Audit
The Eric Marder firm provides one approach to obtaining tracking data without doing customized studies.17 They maintain a panel of 3000 women from 1000 areas. Each woman keeps a record of all television commercials she sees in the course of one randomly assigned day each month. Before watching television on her assigned day, she records her buying-intention for each product category. On the assigned day she watches television normally, except that she records the time, the channel, and the brand advertised from every ad she sees, and her buying-intention immediately after exposure. The received-messages (RM) are defined as the total number of commercials recorded per 100 women. The persuasion rate (PR) is defined as the net percentage of the RM that produce a shift in buying-intention from some other brand to the advertised brand. Subscribers obtain quarterly reports of the RM and PR from all competitor brands in the product class.
When a campaign is running its impact is often monitored via a tracking study. Periodic sampling of the target audience provides a time trend of measures of interest. The purpose is to evaluate and reassess the advertising campaign, and perhaps also to understand why it is or is not working. Among the measures that are often traced are advertisement awareness, awareness of elements of the advertisement, brand awareness, beliefs about brand attributes, brand image, occasions of use, and brand preference. Of particular interest is knowing how the campaign is affecting the brand as opposed to how the advertisement is communicating.
Figure 23-5 shows the tracking of an advertising campaign directed at children for a beverage product.16 Personal interviews were held with children from 6 to 12 years old. They were shown visual stimuli such as pictures of brand packaging or line drawings of advertising characters. The mostly open-ended questions were consistently coded over five years. The interest was in the "main character," who was the personification of the brand and playback of the "story" of the advertising, the main creative element.
16Douglas F. Haley, "Advertising Tracking Studies: Packaged-Goods Case Histories," Journal of Advertising Research, 25 (February/March 1985), 45-50.
The successful campaign of year one was expanded with additional executions, which apparently did not have comparable impact. The disappointing results of year two led to a fresh round of copy development aimed at making it more modern and relevant for kids. However, the decline continued in year three. An analysis of verbatim playback suggested that the main character's actions were too predictable. As a result, new ads were developed, which placed the character in a more heroic role—rescuing children in adventurous situations. In year four the main character measure turned up. For the next season the campaign used situations from a child's real life in an attempt to make the advertising more relevant. The result in year five was a dramatic increase in recall of the central creative element and an important increase in two other measures. The tracking program provided, in this case, actionable information over time allowing the advertising to be adjusted around the same theme and become more effective.
The TEC Audit
The Eric Marder firm provides one approach to obtaining tracking data without doing customized studies.17 They maintain a panel of 3000 women from 1000 areas. Each woman keeps a record of all television commercials she sees in the course of one randomly assigned day each month. Before watching television on her assigned day, she records her buying-intention for each product category. On the assigned day she watches television normally, except that she records the time, the channel, and the brand advertised from every ad she sees, and her buying-intention immediately after exposure. The received-messages (RM) are defined as the total number of commercials recorded per 100 women. The persuasion rate (PR) is defined as the net percentage of the RM that produce a shift in buying-intention from some other brand to the advertised brand. Subscribers obtain quarterly reports of the RM and PR from all competitor brands in the product class.
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