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Ameritest® Japan Frequently Asked Question
Questionnaire Design
17. What kind of information is collected?
18. Is this qualitative or quantitative research?
19. Do the respondents get a chance to describe their reactions to the advertising in their own words?
20. What kinds of ratings scale does Ameritest® use?
21. What parts of the Ameritest® questionnaire are core and what parts can be customized?
22. Can Ameritest® be customized to deal with special issues?
23. How can I use an Ameritest® to lean about competitive advertising?
24. How can I use an Ameritest® to learn about campaign effects?
25. How does Ameritest® deal with rough-produced advertising?
Q.17 What kind of information is collected?
A.17 Fundamentally, Ameritest® collects three types of information. Think of an Ameritest ® report as a zoom lens that gives you three different analytical views of a commercial's performance. These views reflect differences in scale of the different time frames over which advertising can be expected to work.
The 50mm lens: The first level of advertising performance is the Level of the Sale. That is the potential impact on business results over the short term. This information provides a report card on the overall performance of the commercial relative to comparative benchmarks. The key evaluative measures are Attention, Brand Linkage and Motivation. For easy reference, these data are summarized on the Performance Summary page, which is the first data page of the report.
The wide angle lens: The second level of advertising performance is the level of the brand. This is about the potential long-term impact the advertising will have on how the brand is positioned in the mind of the customer. Keep in mind that the major benefit of doing advertising is building brands. A variety of rating statements, persona ratings, and occasionally some open-ended questions will be used to describe the impression the audience has of the brand positioning after viewing the test advertising. These ratings will be compared to other benchmarks, such as the ratings of other commercials in the pool, to past advertising history, and occasionally to control cells.
The telescopic lens: The third level of advertising performance is the level of viewer processing. It deals with the actual moment-by-moment experience the viewer has of the commercial during the time it is running.
Understanding the structure of this experience is the key to developing diagnostic insights about the performance of the advertising on the two higher levels. The Ameritest Picture SortsR is the method we use to deconstruct the advertising experience into analytical parts.
Q.18 Is this qualitative or quantitative research?
A.18 Ameritest ®provides quantitative measures of performance but we also provide qualitative insights into the reasons a commercial is performing the way it is.
Q.19 Do the respondents get a chance to describe their reactions to the advertising in their own words?
A.19 The first questions respondents are asked are open-ended questions so that they can give their top-of-mind reactions to the advertising in their own words. These questions can sometimes produce insightful verbatims for use in presentations.
Q.20 What kinds of ratings scales does Ameritest® use?
A.20 Most of the ratings done in an Ameritest ®use a five-point strongly agree to strongly disagree scale. We have quite a bit of experience working with this scale over the years and prefer it for its flexibility in analysis. In general, most ratings are reported out on a top 2 box basis?that is the top two agree ratings.
Occasionally other scales might be used in a customized study, such as adjective checklists in a personality rating. However, we prefer not to confuse respondents by mixing rating scales in the same interview.
Q.21 What parts of the Ameritest ®questionnaire are core and what parts can be customized?
A.21 In general, the questions in the first part of the interview, which produce the report card measures of Attention, Brand Linkage, Motivation and the Communication are kept standard so that meaningful comparisons can be made to norms or other historical benchmarks. This represents approximately the first two thirds (or twenty minutes) of the interview. After that, the diagnostic section of the questionnaire can be freely customized to meet the unique needs of your particular study. Ameritest ®has a fairly large repertoire of diagnostic tools which we draw from for a typical study?but because of interview length constraints we will typically use these only as a subset of the diagnostic approaches that we have available.
Q.22 Can Ameritest® be customized to deal with special issues?
A.22 Yes, this is one of the benefits of a diagnostic system. Very frequently, special questions are added to deal with issues that arise during discussions about expected audience response to the creative.
Q.23 How can I use an Ameritest ®to learn about competitive advertising?
A.23 The same Ameritest ®questionnaire can be used to study competitive ads to learn what's working for the competition. We can explore audience response to a competitive commercial that is currently running, providing a contemporary benchmark to learn how our clients' ads are doing against their competition. Through this process our clients learn more about advertising without the cost of producing their own commercials first. For those who choose to test their ad within competitive clutter, the two measures of Attention and Brand Linkage are collected on those competitors ads.
Q.24 How can I use an Ameritest ®to learn about campaign effects?
A.24 A mini-interview at the end of a questionnaire can be added to test the overall effects of an advertising campaign. We can get a campaign read by showing the respondent the entire advertising pool (three to four ads) and collect measures of Motivation and Communication. These measures are compared to the average scores for individual ads to get a sense of the overall lift in effectiveness generated by the entire set of commercials.
Q.25 How does Ameritest ®deal with rough-produced advertising?
A.25 About 30 percent of the television testing that Ameritest ®does is at a rough stage of production (animatics or photomatics). As a general rule, the earlier in the creative development process that research money is spent, the more productive it is because the research findings can have greater leverage against the final creative product by early identification of opportunities for improving an execution.
