Measure Advertising with Three Questions

by Robert Basow

Ever look at an ad and think, “I don’t get it”? Maybe it’s not just you. A surprising number of ads deliver a confusing message, the wrong message or no message at all. If some of those ads are yours, wouldn’t you want to know so you could fix them?

Many business leaders understand why John Wanamaker said a century ago, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” But Wanamaker didn’t succeed as a Philadelphia merchant by wasting half his ad budget.

 

Monitor Your Ad Investment

Advertising measurement has come a long way since Wanamaker wondered about waste. If you’re relying on sales to measure success, you’re waiting too long. Monitoring earlier results can help you divert funds from less productive areas to more productive ones. Consequently, regular measurement makes it easy to manage change in small steps rather than waiting to make major corrections after you’ve discovered you’re off-course.

So what should you be watching? Think of an advertising investment as having two parts: Message Development and Message Delivery. Message Development includes the steps necessary to ensure that the right people understand correctly what you are offering. Message Delivery includes everything you do to send that message to the right people so that they can receive it and respond to it.

If you’re re-evaluating your advertising program, Message Delivery can be a good starting point. Consider the media currently used by your target audience. Don’t be surprised if change has snuck up on you faster than DVD players replaced VCRs. In evaluating “new media,” don’t mistakenly compare them to “traditional media.” For example, when online was new, some advertisers thought of it as just “outdoor billboards along the information highway.” Today we know that no business can survive without a web presence, and no ad is complete without a URL.

Next, consider Message Development. Testing ads with consumers is not difficult, as long as you’re not asking them if they “like” the ad or to give you an artistic judgment. It’s far more important to determine their responses to three key questions:

 

Do They Get It?

If you showed your ad to 100 people and asked them to jot down what they remember, how many would correctly understand what you wanted to communicate? Ads don’t work in a vacuum; they come rushing through every possible medium. People don’t take time to ponder the meaning of the message. They either get it or they don’t.

Sometimes they get it wrong. They may remember the message but forget the messenger. Or they may misidentify the messenger, by recalling one advertiser’s message as coming from another. Nothing’s worse than spending your ad dollars to drive business to your competitors.

 

Do They Want It?

Does the ad offer a relevant benefit? To avoid the flood of messages we care nothing about, we filter email, block popups, pitch junkmail and zap through commercials to avoid interruption. Even the few messages that get our attention don’t just cut through the clutter, they add to it.

Why send a message to people who can’t benefit from it? When the right people (your target audience) receive it, does your advertising promise something they’d like to have?

 

Do They Believe It?

A successful ad offers an attractive pro-position: “Buy this product, and you’ll get this benefit.” Delivering on that proposition keeps an ad from being an empty promise. When a buyer receives what a seller promises, the buyer will buy again. Few businesses manage to succeed when customers only buy once. Regardless of how powerful or memorable an ad may be, nobody buys a bad product twice.

Businesses build long-term customer relationships based on trust. They earn that trust by consistently delivering what their customers want and by ensuring that what they buy fully meets their expectations.

If John Wanamaker were alive today, he wouldn’t wonder which half of his advertising budget was wasted. He’d want to know how well every nickel was working. Wouldn’t you?

Robert Basow is an associate professor of strategic communications at the William Allen White School of Journalism & Mass Communications at the University of Kansas. He can be reached by phone at 785.864.7633 or by email at basow@ku.edu.