3 metrics to predict advertising success

When David Ogilvy wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man, wherein he outlined his principles of successful advertising in 1963, I’m not sure he envisioned that nearly 60 years later it would still be the bedrock on which successful advertising was built. While Ogilvy was an advertising genius, he strongly believed in the value of consumer research — famously stating that “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy.”

Fast forward 60 years and there is extensive empirical evidence published in The Journal of Advertising Research and The Journal of Marketing Research that advertising works. And according to Nielsen Catalina research, creative quality contributes to almost 50% of advertising’s overall in-market success.

Unfortunately, despite all the resources available to today’s modern marketers, we still struggle to maximize marketing ROI. According to eMarketer, only 23% of CMOs know if the right message is hitting the right audience at the right time. Knowing the importance of creative quality, why are so many marketers still struggling to maximize their advertising ROI?

In my opinion, it is because the advertising research industry has simply not been able to keep up with the rapid change of today’s marketing world and the speed at which businesses operate. Marketers no longer have the luxury of waiting four weeks for advertising research. But speed has little value if the quality of insights does not effectively inform creative optimization and improve your advertising. In other words, speed and quality are essential for effective creative insights.

Even though many companies use different ways of measuring advertising, most agree that great advertising does three things. An ad has to:

1. Grab your attention and be remembered

2. Link back to the brand

3. Communicate something persuasive enough to drive a behavior change

Unfortunately, many of the approaches available today yield complicated, black box outcome metrics that are difficult to interpret.

The Zappi Creative Suite measures great advertising using a simple and transparent framework of Creative Appeal, Brand Linkage, and Behavior Change. The simple question of “How much do you like the ad” that we use to measure Creative Appeal has been proven by the ARF in their "Copy Research Validation Project” to be the single most predictive question in measuring ad success.

Many leading advertising researchers like Erik du Plessis, Dr. Rachel Kennedy, and Byron Sharp have also shown that the emotional reaction of “liking an ad” increases the potential sales effectiveness of that ad because it encourages consumers to pay more attention to it.

We have tested more than 6,000 ads globally using this simple, easy-to-understand framework, and it has been proven to deliver similar business decisions than much more complex methodologies in more than 90% of cases — 80% faster and at 20% of the cost.

Not only will the Zappi Creative Suite provide you with a powerful transparent advertising measurement framework, but it also offers guidance on how to move forward by identifying areas for optimization and providing clear direction on how to improve your ad’s performance.

One of these optimization improvements is the addition of a new key message clarity measure that offers the very best and most complete creative diagnostics, essential for evaluating advertising messaging before campaign launch. Key message clarity not only determines how well your key messages are being communicated, but also which messages are the most influential in impacting consumer Behavior Change.

The Zappi Creative Suite offers the perfect harmony between insights that are fast and produced with high quality, validated research methodologies. Zappi’s transparent yet comprehensive advertising evaluation framework is built on proven advertising effectiveness metrics supported by rich diagnostics providing clear direction on proposed advertising optimization.