A recent article in Ad Age discussed an issue that we’ve been hearing a lot of clients talking about lately – the problems with old copy testing methods in a changing world. The topic of copy testing has always been polarizing. One camp firmly believes in copy testing’s ability to pick the winners, provide actionable diagnostic feedback and thus mitigate risk and ensure advertising that works in-market. The other camp has always firmly believed that copy testing isn’t actually very successful at predicting winners, instead rewarding formulaic advertising and stifling creativity.
Dramatic shifts in the world of advertising have created even more pressures on copy testing, with advertisers needing more rapid feedback in a fast-moving world, and the expansion of online branded content requiring ever more copy be produced, including copy that is highly customized for specific audience segments.
Many campaigns that have been copy tested fail to produce in-market success, lending credence to the argument that copy testing doesn’t work all that well. (Of course, this begs the question of how much worse the overall advertising environment might be if copy testing didn’t exist…) On the other hand, there are countless non-tested approaches that crash and burn (or fizzle and die) when they hit the market, suggesting that not all brave anti-copy testing senior executives are all that prescient either.
It would be great if all advertising decision makers had the intuition and foresight to identify the potential power of ‘Just Do It’ – to name just one of the countless, non-copy tested classics. This individual also needs to be able to identify with certainty those ideas that look good on paper but will fail to connect – either because they are actually small, non-breakthrough ideas or are clever but don’t speak effectively to the hearts and minds of the target audience. But, unfortunately, the kind of advertising wisdom and judgement that can make those calls – not to mention the senior management culture that’s okay with a no-copy testing scenario – isn’t found in many companies.
I would suggest that the odds of launching a successful new campaign – or even of producing strong executions within an existing campaign – can be improved dramatically by advertisers who take a more disciplined approach to examining and learning from past in-market results – both successes and failures. Examining actual marketing results in an in-depth manner, and documenting the foundational learning that results, can lead to both dramatic and incremental improvements that are, in fact, highly predictive of both short term and long term advertising success.
No, I’m not talking about simply re-executing what’s worked in the past. To the contrary, great value can be gained by studying past failures and other scenarios where not-so-stellar marketplace performance was attained to ensure against repeating those mistakes. And as for the successes, yes, learn from those too – but use them like a launching pad, not like a copying machine.
The words of George Santayana in 1863, and echoed by Winston Churchill nearly a decade later – ‘Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it’ – are ones that advertisers who are looking to improve their advertising might well take to heart.
