Amanda Phillips, Millward Brown’s Head of UK Marketing, looks at how ad testing can be used in conjunction with brand tracking to make marketers more nimble.
The marriage of promise and experience is what makes a brand. To know whether a promise is being delivered, brands need a 360 degree view of how it is expressed and consumed.
Advertising plays a major role in expressing the brand promise. It’s critical, therefore, to find out not only whether an ad is effective in its own right, but also whether it will have payback for the brand and the customer experience.
This becomes even more important as the evolution of multimedia campaigns and programmatic enables marketers to surround the consumer with the brand and the promise.
A digital world demands that brands become more agile, and a significant step in that process is updating their approach to research and understanding, learning how to effectively mix new faster insight tools with more established brand tracking measures.
The first task is to enable testing to be carried out as close to execution as possible in order to allow for on-the fly optimisation.
Advertisers should focus on getting fast indications of an ad’s performance in market. They need to identify questions that establish whether an ad will engage, deliver the intended brand associations and build brand predisposition, allowing them to choose the right ad from a set, or check whether creative will ‘travel’ into other markets, for example. Automated tools currently exist that provide results within six hours.
In the programmatic environment, in particular, testing will be critical to ensure that the ad shown is meaningful and useful to the viewer, while also complementing the context in which it appears, and engaging the viewer with customisation rather than spooking them by ‘knowing too much’.
The right mix of research tools will need to mirror the ‘tailored’ experience that the audience will be getting by serving different content to respondents based on their behaviour and demographics while they are in the survey.
In-market brand tracking can then be used to measure what people felt and believed as a result of seeing the ad – allowing marketers to flex and change messaging to better reflect the brand promise while also, importantly, recognising that consumers are influenced by more than one or two ads.
Alongside these faster measures, advertisers also need to understand what will work to drive purchase decisions and build the brand. They will need to know how an ad makes the audience think and feel – and therefore the likely impact on brand perceptions and associations.
Established survey measures will deliver the depth of insight needed to evaluate strengths and weaknesses to establish what works and what doesn’t in different contexts. It will help them identify how to improve the ad to get a better return – for example by positioning it differently in a new market.
Research earlier in the creative development process will provide clear guidance on the most effective creative messages. For instance, if the brand is not as well trusted as its competitors, building a more emotional connection by running the ad that instils the greatest sense of confidence will achieve the desired objective.
It may feel a bit counter-intuitive, but such early stage research with the ability to provide a full in-depth evaluation of broader core ideas and their ability to deliver against the brand strategy is also a critical part of agile marketing.
This is because while short-term optimisation of creative will help brands seize the immediate opportunities presented, it is immersive, post hoc research that will ensure brands are delivering the longer-term brand strategy.
Tactical efforts will fail to drive sustainable brand impact and growth unless they’re executed within the bounds of a big idea that has been proven to work.
It’s crucial that brands test and track advertising’s role in the customer experience to discover how well the brand promise is being delivered. If an ad reflects the experience the brand intends to create, but the consumer experience doesn’t live up to the promise, this is a signal that improvements need to be made in how the brand is executed by the customer-facing parts of the business, or to how people engage with the brand promise internally.
Advertising can now longer be separated from total brand delivery. But only brands that test early and test often will know where they need to improve on the consumer experience.
By Amanda Phillips
Head of UK Marketing
Millward Brown