As legendary director Stanley Kubrick once said, a great ad idea in just 30 seconds explains why “some of the most spectacular examples of film art are in the best TV commercials.”
But for all the creativity and technical execution that goes into producing the high-quality ads we’ll see this NFL season, many of advertisers’ biggest decisions will hinge on out-of-date, survey-based methods for measuring creative effectiveness.
Whether they measure consumers’ favorability, brand recall, or purchase intent, all of these methods focus on what consumers say, rather than what they do. We’re not measuring whether the ad did its job: driving a consumer to meaningful action.
CMOs invest heavily in increasingly ambitious creative to reach football’s massive TV audiences, combining high production values with pricey celebrity talent. But a funny or inspiring ad won’t be enough to satisfy today’s CEOs and CFOs; it needs to impact the bottom line.
Without metrics truly aligned with business results, creatives are pressured to produce ads with tired tactics that drive consumers to merely remember their brand while flying blind when assessing whether those spots compelled viewers to take action. Once the campaign is over, creative agencies and their CMO clients are stuck defending huge investments to their C-suite colleagues and boards with weak data that does not align with business results.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way. By reorienting creative measurement toward real, in-market consumer behaviors, marketers can empower creative professionals to unleash their most groundbreaking ideas while better understanding how their ads drive the critical business outcomes their clients expect.
The trouble with surveys
Survey-based tools for measuring creative effectiveness often incentivize advertisers to repeatedly beat consumers over the head with brand messaging. That’s bad news for TV viewers this football season, and worse news for the advertisers themselves.
EDO research has found that ads with price offers don’t outperform those without them. And, while focus groups can help validate ideas and avoid many such pitfalls, they often miss the mark on the groundbreaking creative that transforms brands and businesses.
All of this is to say that the bluntest approaches incentivized by survey metrics aren’t always the best. What the reliance on these old-school metrics does is make creative pros less fulfilled and keep their CMO clients from the decision-worthy data and insights that move the business forward.
