Measuring Ad Effectiveness

Effectiveness of Advertising
"Measuring Ad Effectiveness"
Article No. 10 (final in the series) by Hideaki Koizumi

I've talked at length about measuring ad effectiveness in my previous nine articles, but this is the final article of the series. Usually, the companies who focus on measuring ad effectiveness, such as SPI, tend not to explain their methodologies so transparently. They tend to prefer to talk about much more opaque, 'black box' solutions. But since I believe readers of this series of articles are those who would like to measure ad effectiveness by yourselves, I've been very detailed in all my explanations. Moreover, I've offered you several techniques that are easy to follow and do not require the knowledge of advanced statistics. I've always tried to keep this in mind when writing these articles because you cannot learn all there is to know about measuring ad effectiveness simply by attending a one-day seminar. I also don't think you should entirely leave this important issue up to some specialist company to figure out in isolation. The most important thing is you get interested in clarifying the effectiveness of your ad activities.

There are many people (including those who work at ad agencies) who think of themselves as being experts on ad effectiveness. But you know more about your brands/products than they do. And ad effectiveness will be different depending on the category/brand, as well as consumers' intentions/actions. Therefore, what I would like you to do is to deeply think about your own customers with regard to their intentions/actions. This does not mean we can totally ignore measuring analytics, however. Up until now, it has been thought of as being 'taboo' for media planners to analyze ad effectiveness as it relates to sales. Even now, we can not be 100% accurate in measuring how much ads contribute to sales. But there has been remarkable progress with advanced computer technologies and new analysis techniques. I hope you get interested in these so that you can better appreciate ad effectiveness analyses.

Now, I'll introduce some books which may be useful to you to study ad effectiveness. For the field of theoretical advertising, I recommend ' Shin Koukoku Shinri (New Advertising Psychology)', written by Hiroshi Tanaka & Yoshihito Maruoka (Dentsu) with supervision by Sadafumi Nishina. Another one is ' Brand Communications No Riron To Jissai (Brand Communications' Theory and Actuality)'. I've mentioned this book before in this series. It was written by John R. Rossiter and Larry Percy (Tokyo Agency). I think it will also be helpful to you.

If you would like to try to do measuring analysis yourself, I recommend ' MBA Marketing Research Nyumon (Guide)', written by Takaho Ueda and others (Toyo Keizai Shimbunsha). This book comes with some sample software which you can easily use and follow along. For those who want to learn from more than just books, I recommend you attend some academic meetings. At first, you may feel uncomfortable attending academic meetings because you think that they are only for university professors. But actually there are academic meetings in which many businessmen do attend. For example, Nihon Koukoku Gakkai (Japan Academy of Advertising) has a lot of members who are businessmen, and usually meets once a month (but the frequency of the meetings varies from one regional chapter to the next). Simply by paying just a couple thousand yen at the national convention, anybody (the general public) can listen to lectures from business celebrities. I recommend you join as the yearly membership fee is around JPY10,000, which is really not too expensive. There are other interesting learning societies as well, such as Shohisha Koudo Kennkyu Gakkai (Society of Consumer Psychology) and Nihon Marketing Science Gakkai (Japan Institute of Marketing Science). You can visit their Websites for more information.

It is not easy to increase ad effectiveness. But you meet this challenge by tenaciously making the best use of various studies and opportunities. Thank you very much for reading all of my articles over this past one year.

Please contact us with questions or for more detailed information.
spiindex@spi-consultants.net