Does Good Creative Really Matter? Yes, "More Than Anything Else" - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBloggers

I can just see my good friend and mentor Burt Manning gagging as he reads the first five words of the title of this blog post Not only Burt one of the world39s great Advertising Hall Of Fame members but everyone at every creative agency would be taken aback by such a question The entire industry was originally built amp8211 before media became so important amp8211 on the idea that the only thing that really counts is great creative So what could lead me to even ask such a questionIt all started back in the 3980s with the rise of marketing mix modeling MMM By the 3990s when Ed Dittus sold MMA to Aegis there had arisen a counterculture of numbers folks who looked at advertising in a new purely quantitative way To them it appeared that a GRP was a GRP regardless of the messaging quality I have seen MMM people put forth the argument that their data do not support the idea that creative makes any difference at all X GRP means Y sales and that39s thatARS Group the folks who do copy testing for many large advertisers did their own MMM a few years ago in which they showed that MMM incorporating their copytest scores accounted for much more variance in purchases than the raw GRP data aloneA well known MMMer who shall remain nameless dismissed their findings as quotobviously self servingquotThe great thing about MMM is that since each analyst uses slightly different approaches and gets slightly or substantially different results from the same raw data the MMM process remains a black box and people can argue about it endlessly without closure This is important given that otherwise we might run out of things to talk about and people could feel awkwardly silent Recently Mike Hess sent me a superb paper by Len Lodish Ye Hu and Abba Krieger that ran in the ARF Journal of Advertising Research in 2007 and that I had somehow missed Summarizing hundreds of BehaviorScan and matched market tests done by IRI the paper finds that the sales effects of increased TV weight have changed dramatically since 1995The good news is that since 1995 more TV weight does tend to generate significant uptick in sales for mature brands whereas prior to 1995 this was a much smaller average uptickThe authors Len Lodish is a giant in our field also point to high variability in the results which suggests to us that creative does make a difference and in fact the final conclusion of the paper is a call for better and earlier measurements of the strength of copy in terms of probable sales effects hence it is obvious where the authors stand on the question with which we began this postHowever what really nails the question for me is the recent disclosures by Mars Inc Being based on real empirical householdlevel singlesource and not on aggregate market level MMM inferencesmodels I tend to take these results more seriously as a basis for advising clients on how they spend their hundreds of millions of dollars each yearMars found that it was able to lift its TV ROI from 70 cents to 2 in a three year period in England France and Germany by using the data from the three small singlesource panels operating in those countries at that time But the big news is that more than half of this improvement came from the creative side from seeing which commercials work on sales and which don39t And running the sales producers more and the others ones less or not at allIf this doesn39t nail the answer to the title question I don39t know what does Great creative matters and it matters more than anything else amp8211 more than everything else combinedMars also reported that media improvements amp8211 seeing which media types had the highest ROI for the brand often related to the density of purchasers of specific types within their audiences but also related to environmental psychological factors amp8211 accounted for a bit less than half of this total improvement amp8211 and even that less than half of the difference between Mars quotprequot 70 cents and Mars quotpostquot 2 return on TV adspend is a huge improvement when projected to a brand spending say 50 million a year in TVSo it turns out as suspected all along that creative does make a difference amp8211 a huge difference amp8211 and is the central factor in the sales success of advertising We really do have to figure out what the purchasers are thinking and how to get them to favor our brand more We really do have to indulge the colorful creative folks in their preferred oddities or whatever it takes to get the pearls and we must not swinishly mark up their copy as if sitting on a higher throne of creativityNot only that Len Lodish is right we need to really early on test the commercials for sales effect We have great tools for pretesting communications effects and great tracking studies for tracking communications effects but sales effects are something slightly different Yes persuasion correlates with sales amp8211 somewhat amp8211 but not so exactly not all the time It39s time to add real sales measurements to the arsenal of advertising creative researchTRA does this of course Any singlesource does this and at the moment TRA is the only singlesource game in US town TRA clients right now are looking up the sales effects of their various creative executions One client has found that one execution has nearly 4 times the sales effect of the average of the brand39s whole commercial pool Getting these patterns known early helps as Mars has shownOne of my pet dreams is that we see enough results across enough brands to really discover some underlying generalizations about what works and what doesn39t in the present era some gathering of insights that can be meaningful to the creatives grist for their mill that can spur the next great leap forward in our business As John Lennon said you may say that I39m a dreamer but I39m not the only oneBill Harvey has spent over 35 years leading the way in the area of media research with special emphasis on the New Media Bill can be contacted at billtraglobalcomRead all Billamp8217s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Bill Harvey MediaBizBloggers

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Does Good Creative Really Matter? Yes, "More Than Anything Else" - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBloggers

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