Marketing Communications

PRE-TESTING OF ADVERTISING 293

Pre-testing of advertising

In a pre-test , advertising stimuli are tested before the ad appears in the media. Th e general

purpose is to test an ad or diff erent ads to assess whether or not they can achieve the purpose

for which they are designed. Th e problems for which pre-testing can provide an answer are

shown in Figure 9.2.

Oft en diff erent concepts or executions of a new campaign are developed. Pre-testing helps

with selecting the most eff ective one. As a fi nal check, a number of characteristics of a fi n-

ished stimulus can be tested before media placement. As discussed before, consumers are

assumed to go through a number of persuasion stages before buying a product or becoming

loyal to a brand. Advertising, and communications in general, should serve as a guide to

accompany the potential consumers through these stages. To that end, communications

stimuli should generate a number of intermediate processes or communications eff ects,

such as creating attention, carrying over information, evoking acceptance of the message,

credibility, positive aff ective reactions about the ad and the brand, and purchase intention.

In a pre-test the extent to which these intermediate eff ects are generated can be tested. Oft en,

a campaign consists of a number of similar ads, i.e. diff erent executions of the same basic

communications strategy. Diff erent executions are oft en used to keep attention to the

campaign alive by altering the format of the ad. Evidently, not all formats are equally appealing.

A pre-test can help in establishing the extent to which some executions are more eff ective

than others, and thus assist in deciding upon the frequency of placement of the various ads.

Th ree basic categories of ad pre-tests can be distinguished ( Figure 9.3 ): a number of desir-

able characteristics can be tested internally, and samples of consumers can be used to test the

communications or intermediate eff ects, or to test behavioural eff ects.

A campaign can be tested internally by the advertising agency and/or the advertiser

by means of a checklist or readability analysis. Pre-test checklists are used to make sure

that nothing important is missing, and that the ad is appealing, powerful and ‘on strategy’.

Table 9.2 contains an example of a checklist for internal evaluation. Every ad can be qualitat-

ively judged on each criterion. Obviously, not every criterion will be equally important for

every campaign. For instance, the number of times the brand name is mentioned may not be

important at all in an image campaign, and in a provocative campaign ‘likeability’ may

not be all that important.^2

Another type of internal test is the readability analysis. Good advertising copy is simple

and easy to understand, especially since members of the target group are oft en paying only

marginal attention to the text in an ad. Th is implies that advertising copy should be under-

stood ‘at fi rst glance’. Several methods have been developed to test this ‘readability’. For

Figure 9.2 Objectives of pre-testing

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