Q.42 Why isn't the Ameritest ®System called copytesting?

A.42 We happen to believe that television is primarily a visual experience. Our motto is, if you don't think the pictures are the most important part of a television commercial, buy radio?it's cheaper.

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Q.43 What is the Ameritest ®Advertising Model?

A.43 The Ameritest® Advertising Model can be found in the methods section of any Ameritest® report. This is a heuristic model designed to help you better understand the relationships between all the major measurements collected about your advertising.

Basically, the model says that for any commercial to be effective it must accomplish three things:

1. It must get noticed and attract an audience.
2. The audience must know who the advertising message is coming from.
3. While you have your audience's attention you must sell them something?i.e., motivate them.

The model goes on to explain how you get the Attention, Brand Linkage and Motivation described above.

Attention is a function of two aspects of the execution:

1. Does the execution entertain or reward viewers with an enjoyable or likable experience in return for the 30 seconds you are asking them to spend with you?
2. Is the execution a well-edited piece of film that leads viewers' attention and focuses their thoughts on the important ideas and images in the commercial at a pace they can easily keep up with?

Brand Linkage is also a function of two aspects:

1. How clearly does the edited film focus viewers attention on the identity of the brand sending them a message.
2. How well are the thoughts about the brand integrated into the narrative of the spot?i.e., is the brand the hero of the spot?

Motivation is also a function of two variables:

1. How relevant, believable and brand differentiating is the strategic promise you are communicating to your customer, and
2. How much emotional drama have you created and wrapped around that promise to make it seem larger than life and even more compelling.

As with any model, the current Ameritest® Advertising Model is a simplification and a work in progress. Currently, we believe it is the most complete advertising model used by any pretesting system. But with the help of all of our clients, we are challenged to continuously work to improve our model of how advertising works over time.

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Q.44 What kinds of validations has Ameritest® done?

A.44 Ameritest® has about 70 advertising cases to date where we can show a high correlation (an r-squared of approximately 50%, depending on the product category) between the three performance measures of Attention, Brand Linkage and Motivation and actual in-market sales results.

We also have an extensive set of validations showing the relationship between our diagnostic measures and the performance measures. The primary validated relationships are outlined in the Ameritest® Advertising Model which can be found in any Ameritest® report. Several of these validations have been published in the Journal of Advertising Research .

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Q.45 How is Ameritest ®different from other pretesting systems?

A.45 First, Ameritest® offers a more complete model of how advertising works. Most of the measurements collected in other advertising testing systems have their equivalent measure in the Ameritest® system. But Ameritest® provides several major diagnostic components (the Flows of Attention® and EmotionR) that cannot be found in other copytesting systems. Specifically, the kinds of information provided by other copy-testing systems are merely a subset of the information contained in the Ameritest® system.

Second, Ameritest® places much more emphasis on providing insightful diagnostics, particular with our moment-by-moment flow measures. Our goal is to help you fully understand the reasons why a particular commercial is performing the way it is.

Third, Ameritest® is unique in the approach it takes to understanding the visual component of television advertising.

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Q.46 What is the relationship between Attention and Motivation?

A.46 Attention and Motivation are completely independent or uncorrelated measures. In general, knowing the ability of an execution to break through clutter and attract attention tells you nothing about how motivating the message is and vice versa. That's why single "magic" number approaches to evaluating advertising performance can be very misleading. Multiple measures?Attention, Brand Linkage and Motivation?are needed to completely understand the performance of a television commercial.

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Q.47 How is the Attention Score different from a Recall Score?

A.47

The Attention Score is a measure of commercial intrusiveness in a cluttered advertising environment. This is the measure provided by Ameritest®. It is always important that a commercial gets noticed and attracts a large audience for your advertising message?that's what determines the efficiency of your media spending.

In contrast, some copytesting systems produce recall scores, such as day after recall. Recall may or may not be relevant for evaluating a clients advertising, depending on the kind of advertising being done. Recall is a measurement based on a respondent's ability to recognize an ad from a verbal description , and favors rational, informational, benefit-driven ads?ads that frequently follow the "early and often" rule of brand mentions.

If the job of your advertising is to convey new ideas, or teach the viewer something (rational), recall can be a relevant, if limited, measure of advertising strength. If, however, your advertising has a strong emotional component and is designed to promote the strength of the relationship between your brand and your customer, a recall measure can be a very misleading measure of advertising strength.

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Q.48 Isn't the Ameritest Picture Sorts® technique too analytic? In other words, isn't an ad more than just the sum of its parts?

A.48 Keep in mind that the key measures of performance toplined in an Ameritest® report deal with the performance of a commercial as a whole?that is, the commercial is first viewed as a complete gestalt. We do appreciate the importance of understanding the design integrity of a commercial.

However, to gain insights into how a commercial is working, it is also necessary to deconstruct the ad and look inside the commercial to see how the different parts of film are working together. That's why the Ameritest Picture SortsR is viewed only as a diagnostic tool?but it is the most powerful diagnostic tool we have found for understanding how television viewers process the stream of ideas and images in a television commercial.

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Q.49 How is the Ameritest Picture Sorts® different from other moment-by-moment copytesting techniques?

A.49 The other moment-by-moment systems on the market ask respondents to record their responses to a commercial with a dial or some other metering system while they are actually watching the commercial. Our viewpoint is that this approach is too intrusive and requires that the respondents be artificially introspective while they watch the ad. This changes and contaminates the viewers' advertising experience. Our approach is simply to use photographs taken from the commercial as a visual aid for respondents to use in reconstructing the advertising experience (like a witness in a courtroom). This occurs typically 20 minutes into the interview, well after the initial reactions to the advertising have been collected.

Second, one of the primary applications of the Picture SortsR Technique?the Flow of Attention®?measures what images the respondent paid attention to while watching the commercial. This question cannot even be asked with a dial-a-meter approach?the question simply doesn't make sense in that context. Thus, the Picture SortsR approach is more powerful than other moment-by-moment approaches.

Third, the Picture SortsR is low tech?it doesn't require special equipment. Thus, it is simpler and more convenient to use in a variety of research settings. For example, it works quite well in a qualitative, focus group setting. (You might want to try it out firsthand the next time you conduct focus groups on your advertising?it's simple and quite intuitive.

Just give Ameritest® a call and we'll be glad to give you tips on how to do this.)

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