Importance of pre-testing in advertising

Pre-testing is carried out to evaluate advertising prior to its first use. It’s done at a late stage using finished materials, such as the final version of a TV commercial. There’s considerable financial and professional investment at stake, so it’s no surprise that pre-testing is often contentious and viewed by some as imprecise. Some of the most successful campaigns have bombed in pre-testing.

Remember the Heineken ‘Refreshes’ ad that came out in the 70s? Or Levi’s ‘Bold New Breed’, or Stella Artois’s ‘French Peasants.’ All these ads did poorly in pre-testing but succeeded on-air. The research report for Stella Artois predicted that brand awareness would be below average and the ad wouldn’t communicate the brand’s all-important exclusivity. Stella Artois ignored the findings, and the ad helped Stella turn from a niche product into a top-five grocery brand in the UK. By contrast, ads like Sainsbury’s ‘Value To Shout About’ in the late 90s pre-tested well with consumers but proved a major turn-off for Sainsbury’s middle-England heartland. Sainsbury’s switched its TV account to M&C Saatchi soon after.

Why can't ad testing always predict real-world success? There are many potential reasons. It could be that people participating in market research know they're being watched, and might feel their job is to be critical. After all, it's impossible to replicate a Sunday afternoon in front of the telly during a research situation. However, might the pre-testing model itself be flawed, and measuring the 'wrong' criteria for an ad's success?

The Pre-Testing Model

Currently the pre-testing model bases success on whether an ad can communicate a well-branded and persuasive message that gets the viewer's conscious attention. The consumer's thought process is assumed to go something like this: we're alerted to a new piece of information, we think about it, and this persuades us of the brand's benefits. Advertising effectiveness is measured in key messages, persuasion, brand linkages. These measures stretch back to the influential theories of Daniel Colley in the 1960s, who thought that advertising took people from unawareness to awareness, from awareness to comprehension, from comprehension to conviction, from conviction to desire, and from desire to action. It’s a convenient model for the research industry to perpetuate because it’s a linear, sequential and seemingly logical approach which is very easy to structure pre-testing.

“The approach fundamentally misunderstands the way the mind works. It is anachronistic and does not fit at all with a whole body of recent learning in neuroscience, psychology and in-market effectiveness case studies, which have shown the important contribution of emotion to decision-making” Orlando Wood, Innovation Director at BrainJuicer

Could it be that we're assuming decision-making requires lots of thought? It seems like a funny thing to say, but remember the last time you had to decide between two different things to have for lunch. How much of your decision was based on thought and how much was because of an intuitive gut-feeling?

The Man Who Couldn't Decide

In Descartes’ Error, neurologist Antonio Damasio recounts the case of a patient with ventromedial prefrontal brain damage who lost his ability to feel emotion. This affected him in several ways. The patient was able for instance to drive calmly and dispassionately past cars involved in accidents. However on another occasion he had to decide between two similarly acceptable alternative dates for his next appointment. Using pure reason alone, he seemed unable to weigh up the pros and cons of the two dates, and the hospital staff had to choose the date for him. Over and over again he found that he couldn't make decisions. Damasio's findings suggested that emotions were crucial to decision-making. This was later echoed by scientists at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, who found that a decision is formed in our subconscious around 10 seconds before we believe we’ve consciously made that decision.

So emotion plays a much bigger role in our decision-making than we previously thought. Does that mean that a pre-testing model which uses an emotional metric might measure advertising success more effectively?

A New Pre-Testing Model

One solution might come from the research agency BrainJuicer, which invented a new measure of emotion called FaceTrace®. It's based on the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, who established that there are seven human emotions we all express in the same way regardless of our background or culture: happiness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, contempt and sadness. FaceTrace® uses pictures of these human faces in different states of emotion to measure emotional response. They conducted a research experiment in conjunction with the IPA and analysed a total of 18 historical TV ads, comparing how this new emotional measure fared next to traditional pre-testing methods. Their analysis revealed that emotional response - the intensity with which people feel any emotion after seeing an ad - could indeed be a better predictor of effectiveness than commonly used evaluative information-processing measures. It revealed that persuasion and brand linkage measures are most likely to predict moderate levels of effectiveness and actively discriminate against highly effective ads. For instance, take this ad:

The Cadbury’s Chocolate Digestive Ad Thank You is a highly emotional ad that dramatises ‘the joy women experience upon discovering Cadbury Chocolate Digestives’. The feeling of exaltation is emphasised by the gospel standard ‘Oh Happy Day’. The ad achieved a high emotion score on FaceTrace®, yet only a relatively small proportion of their sample accurately replayed the message – that Cadbury’s chocolate was now available on a digestive. According to Orlando Wood at BrainJuicer, the advertising ran in Q2 of 2007, and value sales in this quarter were up 218% vs the previous quarter and 126% vs the same quarter of the previous year. For an investment of just under £1 million, the advertising generated an additional £2.59 million in sales. The team went on to retrospectively test four TV ads in Canada that won CASSIES awards, and found that it was emotion rather than current pre-testing measures that singled out the award-winning ads.

So could emotional response be a better indicator of efficiency than other pre-testing measures, and can it therefore be used as a highly effective media planning tool? Could its use branch out to test other things - for instance, a brand's social media?