advertising effectiveness test

advertising effectiveness test

a means of measuring the impact or likely impact of an ADVERTISEMENT or an ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN on the sales of a product. Such tests fall into two basic categories:
  1. pre-testing in which particular advertisements are tried out on a representative sample of buyers or potential buyers (see TEST MARKETING) to decide, in advance, which one of them is likely to make the biggest impact on prospective buyers. Methods used for this purpose include the sales conviction test and the blind product test. In the former case established buyers of the product are asked which of a number of advertisements would induce them to buy the product, while in the latter case respondents are given ADVERTISING COPY and asked to select from a number of unidentified products the one which best ‘fits’ the advertisement;
  2. post-testing which aims to measure the impact of the advertisements currently used by the firm. Various recognition tests can be used for this purpose, including asking readers of a newspaper or viewers of commercial television where the advertisement has been placed whether they have read or seen the advertisement in question. Deeper probing of the impression an advertisement may have made can be done by the unaided recall test where respondents are asked to comment from memory on particular details of the advertisement.