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Ameritest® Japan Frequently Asked Questions
Using the Information
37. What kinds of decisions should I make with this research?
38. What are the Ameritest® Learning Strategies?
39. How do I use this information to make the advertising better?
40. Why do I need diagnostics if I have a great-scoring ad?
41. How should I think about differences in advertising performance between countries?
Q.37 What kinds of decisions should I make with this research?
A.37 There are a number of different types of decisions that can be made with this research. First, the evaluative measures can be used as a report card for determining whether or not the advertising is strong enough to put on air. Second, the diagnostic information can be used in editing decisions for optimizing the performance of the advertising. Third, the diagnostic information about the strengths and weaknesses of the commercial can be used to provide guidance in the future evolution of the campaign. Fourth, diagnostic information about the relative appeal of a commercial to different target audiences?such as men versus women, older versus younger customers, etc.,?can be used in optimizing media decisions.
Q.38 What are the Ameritest ®Learning Strategies?
A.38 Ameritest® believes that the ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage. For that reason we like to think of our system as an advertising learning system.
From a process stand point, we have identified five different strategies that Ameritest® clients systematically use to ensure that they learn as much as possible about how their advertising is working.
The first strategy is simply discourse. In the end all advertising decisions should be based on good judgment. We believe that having a good dialogue between client and agency, brand managers and creatives, is key to understanding all the different ways a commercial might be perceived, or misperceived, by your target audiences. An Ameritest® research meeting provides a good forum for generating productive advertising discourse. From our standpoint, the role of the Ameritest® presenter is simply to facilitate a good advertising discussion between the members of the advertising team.
The second strategy is quantitative evaluation. Because of the amount of money being spent on the advertising, it's simply a good business practice to have a quantitative quality control processes in place.
The third strategy is experimentation. Like new products, the more ideas you test the more likely you are to find a winner, or get an out-of-the-box, rule-breaking advertising campaign on air. This calls for testing a lot of ideas. And in the long run, it calls for testing at a rough stage of production so that you can afford to test a lot of ideas.
The fourth learning strategy is an emphasis on diagnostics. It is not enough to know whether your advertising is performing well or poorly, you must also learn why it is performing the way it is.
The fifth learning strategy is based on competitive analysis. Your competitors are trying to sell the same customers that you are?and yet they have advertising different from yours. How is their advertising working? After all, their advertising is what you have to beat! Not knowing the strength of your competitors' advertising while only measuring the strength of yours is equivalent to setting the price of your products without knowing the price of your competitors' products.
Q.39 How do I use this information to make the advertising better?
A.39 A good creative can usually come up with a solution to any problem identified in a particular commercial as long as the problems are sufficiently well defined. The role of research is to define the advertising problem as precisely as possible for creatives.
Q.40 Why do I need diagnostics if I have a great-scoring ad?
A.40 If you don't fully understand what was working in a great-scoring ad, you may not be able to duplicate the performance when you do advertising pool-outs in the campaign.
Q.41 How should I think about differences in advertising performance between countries?
A.41 One of the benefits of the visual diagnostics in the Ameritest® system is that they allow us to cross language barriers to gain insights into how advertising imagery works with different cultural groups. One reason to test the same commercial in different countries is to understand country-by-country differences. So, the answer to this question is very much a work in progress.
