Should Marketers Test Advertising? Advertising creatives have long lamented ad p

Question

Should Marketers Test Advertising?

Advertising creatives have long lamented ad pretesting. They believe it inhibits their creative process and results in too much sameness in commercials. Marketers, on the other hand, believe pretesting provides necessary checks and balances to ensure the ad campaign will connect with consumers and be well received in the marketplace.

Take a position: Ad pretesting is often an unnecessary waste of marketing dollars versus Ad pretesting provides an important diagnostic for marketers as to the likely success of an ad campaign.

Explanation / Answer

Ad pretesting offers a measure or a metric to advertisers, which enables them to indentify the effectiveness of the communication or the impact the advertisement, had. The ads potential to create awareness/knowledge or preference for the particular product/service can be analyzed through pretesting.

To improve the performance of any aspect, we need to measure it first; same holds for advertising. Many advertisers are averse of this position, and believe that ad pretesting is a waste of marketing dollars, but in absence of it, there is no metric for them to measure the effectiveness of their work. They often assess the impact of the completed campaign through posttests. But, if only posttests are used, we cannot improve the effectiveness of the campaign going out.

In simple terms, pretesting allows the marketer to improve the ad’s potential impact before all the marketing dollars are spent and campaign is completed. Hence, the marketing dollars spent on pretesting actually improve the efficiency of the marketing campaign’s total investment. Post-testing does provide us a measure of the campaign’s effectiveness, but it can be measured only after the campaign is completed, hence, the learning can only be applied to the next of the following campaigns, and not the current one. Hence, marketers should test their ad’s communication effectiveness both before and after the ad is put into media or printed/broadcasted.

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