YOU don’t need me to tell you that advertising has become more fragmented, and more expensive. But may I throw another spanner in the works by suggesting that it is becoming less effective?What exactly do we mean by ‘advertising effectiveness’? Do we want to know how many people were exposed to our ad, were able to recall the ad, liked the ad, engaged with the ad or went straight out and bought the product and then recommended it to all their friends by buying a biplane and writing about its fantastic qualities in the sky above Madison Avenue?Advertisers are starting to turn against the established norms of audience size and exposure as their primary measure of value. Although I fear traditional media planning will continue to depend on basic reach and frequency measures for some time yet, it is fast losing relevancy.Whilst researchers continue to actively seek the solution to ad effectiveness measures, the basic metric of audience size plays right into the quantitative court of suppliers such as Nielsen and TNS whilst eliminating the thorny issues of return on investment and effectiveness. The majority of adverting measurement today is still based on approaches that were developed 30 years ago! It is an opportunistic time for advertising research. New tools will evolve as marketers are gradually forced to measure performance based on effectiveness in achieving marketing objectives rather than audience metrics. Current thinking is that virtually all advertising in the future will have directly motivational components thus radically altering the research resources and measures.Let’s not forget that media engagement and advertising engagement are different animals. Crucially, many analysts now believe that audience engagement with content has little correlation to audience’s attention to advertising messages. ‘Oh blast!’ I hear you media people say. Advertisers are hoping that measuring ad engagement will provide thekey to improving consumer response to advertising. Current media research can tell us which programmes, channels, time segments or media are most likely to deliver the numbers but not how those consumers will be affected by the advertising.Some of the most common mistakes being made today in advertising research are a focus on advertising recall and asking consumers to offer opinions of what they thought about the advertising and how it affected them (sound familiar?) All of the current methodologies fail to identify the depth of the relationship – or the emotional bond formed with the consumer and the impact of that bond on purchasing behaviour. We need to develop new tools to connect emotional insight to transactional behaviour.Les Binet (DDB Matrix) claims that effectiveness is not predicted by any one metric but by a whole range of them. Consumer behaviour is influenced by a multitude of other factors besides communication. Today’s obsession with accountability means that simply measuring return on investment (ROI) has not necessarily improved advertising effectiveness. His ideas have been based on an analysis of 1,000 case studies in the IPA databank of the annual effectiveness awards in the UK. Interestingly, his research shows that there had been a substantial increase over time in effectiveness where TV had been the lead medium. There is no better medium than TV for conveying emotion, engaging audiences and getting brands talked about although only real creativity in advertising will cut through.As already noted, today’s thinking is pushing past simplistic metrics and concentrating on ideas relating to the emotional bond between the product and the creative treatment. If you have ever commissioned a media research project, you too would have been frustrated by the inadequacy of researchers to unearth any emotion at all – and without that understanding and sensitivity it is impossible to ever understand the long term equity building impact of an advertising campaign.Technology is also having an effect. With much more information based on consumer interaction with the web, TV, mobile devices and out of home devices such as the portable people meter, new behaviour measures will evolve. Marketers will also need to evaluate the impact of their advertising on total brand sales, company revenues, brand equity and investor value. New media exchange services such as that currently being developed by Google for the online buying and selling of media inventory will eventually integrate with syndicated media management systems to define the impact of media decisions on purchase behaviour. These developments will offer growth and expansion opportunities for research companies, data collection, integration providers, marketing mix modeling companies and of course, media entrepreneurs such as Media E2E.Rex Briggs, CEO of Marketing Evolution in the UK, concluded after research conducted with 30 of the world’s top marketers that nearly one third of advertisements fail. The research puts several more nails in the coffin of old world advertising awareness and recall based research. Media research will have to evolve to embrace new measures that go way beyond audience reach and recall and focus on issues such as engagement with content, attentiveness and responsiveness to advertising, social environment and direct ROI based currencies.Gauntlet anybody?

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