‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it’ (widely attributed to Peter Drucker) and its corollary ‘What gets measured gets done’ are playing out in today’s advertising environment.
As we look back over the past decade, much has changed about advertising – both the media environment and the increasing level of consumer choice in whether they watch the ads at all. Much has also changed in advertising research – notably, shifting methods of assessing advertising performance. One of these shifts has been the growing emergence of neuroscience-based copy testing methodologies, correspondingly reducing the reliance on more traditional copy testing.
Traditional copy testing systems awarded high scores to those ads for which consumers could play back the correct intended message, and those that scored well on ad liking, message importance and credibility using Likert and other similar scales. The result: ads that played well on a rational level, but weren’t necessarily emotionally involving or particularly effective in eliciting gut level, System 1 response.
In contrast, the neuroscience-based suite of measures rewards ads that elicit emotion. In this testing environment, whether an ad conveys a rational message, and whether the consumer reports ‘liking’ the ad when asked to reply to scalar questions are of secondary interest, at best. Not surprisingly, as more advertisers choose the ads to run based on neuroscience-based evaluations, the overall body of ads is becoming more emotionally engaging than it was when more ads were screened via more traditional copy testing screens.
As we’ve watched this gradual transformation of creative content within the advertising environment, one aspect of advertising performance that hasn’t changed significantly is consumers’ ability to connect the ads they’ve seen in-market to the brand being advertised. And while some neuroscience-based copy testing practitioners would tell you that this isn’t important, we at Communicus strongly disagree.
Ads that engage the target audience based on System 1-based emotional appeals cannot expect to have the emotion elicited transfer to the brand unless the consumer connects the emotional experience to the brand itself. If we imagine that space in the System 1 brain in which all of the memories and associations with that particular brand reside, that’s the place in which the ad memory should find a home. Otherwise, the commercial has succeeded in engaging the viewer and making that viewer feel good about the commercial experience, but without any impact on how they feel about the brand itself.
This is not to say that advertisers need to go back to earlier, rational message driven styles of ads. Today’s crop of ads has evolved in several positive ways – one of which is that many of them are more enjoyable to watch and thus less likely to be skipped or avoided. Rather than reverting to past practices, brands that use emotion-based strategies simply need to ensure that the emotion links not just to the ad, but to the brand.
As we look back at the end of the next ten years, perhaps we’ll be able to celebrate a decade in which ads are even less disliked and but also even more effective – benefiting both the consumer and the advertiser.
