Effective advertising is a powerful tool. It has the power to shape the values and beliefs of consumers. It has the power to inform, entertain, engage and change behaviour. It has the power to attach feelings to brands. It has the power to increases sales, revenue and profit in the short-term and beyond. While the potential of effective advertising is undeniable, it is very rarely fulfilled in practice. So what exactly makes an individual advertisement effective and how do you measure its effectiveness? Illuminate’s approach to advertising tracking research goes beyond traditional awareness and recall metrics to measure the influences and drivers relevant to the purchase decision.

1. Advertising
effectiveness
Recognition
Emotion
Value Attitude
Purchase
Energy
Behaviour
Commitment Metrics
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2. What makes advertising effective?
Effective advertising is a powerful tool.
It has the power to shape the values and beliefs of consumers.
It has the power to inform, entertain, engage and change behaviour.
It has the power to attach feelings to brands.
It has the power to increases sales, revenue and
profit.
While the potential of effective advertising is
undeniable, it is very rarely fulfilled in practice.
So what makes an individual ad effective and how
do you capture it?
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3. What makes advertising effective?
Advertising effectiveness is much deeper than establishing whether
respondents are ‘aware’ of an advertisement, or if it is simply ‘liked’.
Most will agree that for an advertisement to be effective, there are three
main conditions which must be fulfilled.
1 Exposure
2 Sensory Registration
3 Impact on attitudes & behaviours
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4. What makes advertising effective?
1 Exposure
This first condition almost goes without saying…to be effective the target
audience must first be exposed to it.
But with consumers exposed to millions of messages each year, exposure
alone is not enough.
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5. What makes advertising effective?
2 Sensory Registration
This second condition refers to the ability of the advertising to register at the
conscious or sub-conscious level.
The messages registered from advertising are not always top of mind.
Yet traditionally, advertising research has focused on
the ability to recall and articulate top of mind information.
Cognitive psychology theories emphasise that in
the purchase decision, the brain recalls more than top
of mind information.
As not all information recall is top of mind, traditional
measures must be supplemented with measures that
go deeper.
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6. What makes advertising effective?
3 Impact on attitudes & behaviours
The third condition is that the advertising ultimately creates an impact.
Effective advertising campaigns may shape values.
They may cause consumers to question long held beliefs.
They may impact on how consumers
feel about a product or service.
They may impact on what, how and
when consumers buy.
But if the impact of advertising is not
immediately obvious to the target
audience, how do you measure it?
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7. Measuring advertising effectiveness
To truly measure advertising effectiveness, the research design must
provide insight into exposure, sensory registration and impact.
Traditional advertising tracking approaches fall short if they only
focus on:
• awareness
• recall
• brand/product perception & propensity to consider
• current and future behavioural response to the call to action (eg
behavioural response)
All these measures are important but they only measure what is top of mind.
In practice, these measures tend to be more aligned to the size of the
advertising budget rather than to advertising effectiveness.
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8. Measuring advertising effectiveness
Just as effective advertising ultimately impacts on emotive and rational
purchase drivers, advertising effectiveness research must go
beyond the traditional measures.
Illuminate’s ad tracking approach:
• supplements the traditional measures with the key rational and emotive
influences and drivers, relevant to the product or brand category
• goes beyond short-term measures to tracking how the brain processes
the advertising message, including where there is no stated recall
• identifies the level of activation of competing brands in the consumer’s
mind
• goes beyond fleeting consumer feelings to identify how brand choice is
influenced by the emotive cues from advertising
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9. When to measure
When to measure is arguably as important as
what to measure
Time between exposure and surveying
impacts on the results
Some studies suggest recall of advertising
falls rapidly after exposure before stablising
Erosion of recall
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6
Unprompted Prompted
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10. When to measure
Continuous Pulse/Wave
(daily/weekly) (pre and post)
clearly identifies impact of
+ advertising on consumers’ short
and long term memory
+ robust before & after measure of
specific marketing activity
+
short term internal and external
market shocks are smoothed out
+ may require smaller sample
sizes, saving money
appropriate for measuring long- + appropriate for measuring short-
+ term marketing strategy
term tactical campaigns
impact of advertising can be - time between exposure and
surveying unduly impacts on
+ correlated against other
continuous data (eg
results
TARPS, sales, enquiries, etc)
- unable to correlate against
media schedule without
- may require larger sample
impacting on cost
repeating exercise many times
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11. When to measure
Because timing can impact on results, Illuminate recommends the
continuous collection of data for most campaigns.
This may be done via a fixed sample of daily or weekly interviews where the
campaign length is greater than one month.
Ideally continuous collection of data should span both periods where the
advertising is on and off air.
It is only by measuring both periods of time that organisations are able to:
• understand the incremental gains, or attrition, in key metrics
• identify advertising wear-out and the need for new creatives
• refine the media schedule to deliver optimal results (often with reduced
spend)
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12. Questions?
Please contact the Illuminate team to discuss your advertising
tracking needs or questions.
Our specialists will work with you to create a customised
advertising tracking approach to measure the effectiveness of your
campaign.
Craig Frost
Managing Director
p. 1800 185 006
enquiries@illuminateresearch.com.au
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