One of the questions we’re asked most often is how anybody can know that a message will work before the money has been spent on the advert. It’s a fair thing to ask, because an advert can be beautifully made and still fall flat if what it says doesn’t matter much to the people watching. If you only find that out once it’s on air, the expensive part is already behind you.
Nobody can know for certain, but you can find out far more than most businesses realise, and most of it costs very little. What’s being tested here is the message, by which we mean the one thing you want a viewer to take away. That’s a separate matter from the idea, the script and the cast that will eventually carry it. A TV advert has room for one main point, so if you could sell on price, on quality or on how quickly you can start, the question is which of those to lead with, and that’s something you can put to your customers before a camera comes out.
Start with the evidence you already have
Most businesses are sitting on more evidence than they think, so spend an afternoon going through it before you pay for anything new. If you run search adverts, you’ve been testing messages for years without calling it that, because every headline is a short promise, and the figures will show you which promises people respond to.
Then there are the people who talk to your customers every day. Whoever answers the phone or works the showroom floor will know the first question people ask, the worry that most often holds them back and the point at which a sale is usually won, and those are quite often different from what’s assumed in the boardroom. Your reviews are useful in the same way, because they tell you in customers’ own words what they valued. If dozens of them mention how tidy your fitters were and hardly anybody mentions the guarantee, you’d want to know that before you build an advert around the guarantee.
It costs very little to ask a few recent customers directly, too, as long as you ask about what they did and not about what they might do. Asking why they chose you, and what nearly stopped them, is asking about a decision that has already been made, so the answers are much more dependable than anything people tell you about what they’d do in future.
Why asking for opinions only gets you so far
That gap, between what people have done and what they say they’d do, is the well-known weakness in the way advertising used to be tested. For years the big brands relied on the focus group, where a dozen people were brought into a room, shown some ideas and asked what they thought. It was useful, but it was slow and expensive, and people who are asked for an opinion in a room full of strangers don’t always say what they’d really do at home.
Heineken is the British example most people in advertising know. In the early 1970s its advertising agency was given a brief that came down to a single word, refreshment, and came back with the claim that Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach. According to a tribute published by D&AD, the design and advertising awards body, the research on the campaign was highly critical. Anthony Simonds-Gooding, who had to make the decision at Whitbread, the company that brewed Heineken in Britain, approved it anyway, and the line went on to be used for more than twenty years.
Stories like that are usually told as a warning against research of any kind, but the more useful lesson is a narrower one. People are poor judges of a finished idea they’ve never seen before, particularly an odd one that needs time to grow on them, and they’re far more dependable when you stop asking and watch what they do.
A quicker way of watching what people do
That’s the thinking behind a small test on social media, which measures behaviour and not opinion, and which is much quicker and cheaper than a room full of people ever was. A simple advert is made for each message, and they’re all shown to the kind of people you want to reach, in the area you serve, so that you can compare how each one is received.
Take a home improvement company that isn’t sure whether to lead with price, with quality or with how quickly it can start. A simple advert for each will show which one makes people stop and look, which one they engage with and which is most likely to get them to act, and all of that is known before anything has been filmed.
A test like that is only as good as it is fair, so the message should be the one thing that changes. Each version needs the same picture, the same audience and the same money behind it, because otherwise you can’t tell whether people preferred the promise or the photograph. It also needs enough response to mean something, since a lead of a few clicks is as likely to be chance as preference. And it’s best judged on whatever sits closest to a sale, which for most businesses is an enquiry and not a like.
A test like this can be run by whoever looks after your social media advertising, whether that’s your own team, your agency or us, and either way we work from what it finds.
What a test like this can’t tell you
We’d be giving you the wrong impression if we said this was foolproof, and the first of its limits is that it tests the message and not the advert. It can tell you what to say, but it can’t tell you how well a particular script, cast or piece of music will work. A related limit is that a click isn’t a sale. The message that gets the most attention is usually the one that brings in the most business, but not always, and an eye-catching promise can pull in plenty of people who were never going to buy.
Nor is social media the same thing as television. People scroll quickly and decide in a second, which favours a blunt offer, whereas TV gives you longer and feeling plays a bigger part. A message about trust or reputation can lose a scrolling contest and still be the right one for an advert whose job is to build your name over time (we’ve written about the difference between building a name and getting a response).
The last limit is that the claim still has to stand up. Whatever wins the test will need to get through Clearcast, which checks every TV advert against the advertising rules before it can be shown, so it only makes sense to test messages you can back up. There’d be no point in discovering that “the lowest prices in the region” beats everything else if you couldn’t prove it. Used with those things in mind, a test is a very good way of taking some of the risk out of a campaign.
What we do with the results
We take the message that came through most strongly and build the TV advert around it, so that when it goes on air it’s based on evidence of what your audience responds to and not on a hunch, whether that’s yours or ours. What you learn isn’t only of use on television, because the same insight can shape your radio adverts, your website, your print and anything else you put out.
There’s a second chance to check once the idea has been drawn up as a storyboard, which is the first point at which you can see how the message will be carried. Show it to somebody who doesn’t know your business well and ask them afterwards what the advert was telling them. If what comes back is the message you chose, it’s doing its job, and if it isn’t, a drawing is the cheapest place to put that right, which is why we always start with a storyboard.
Is it worth doing for a smaller campaign?
It isn’t always worth it, because if you already know your customers well and there’s one obvious thing to say, a test may only tell you what you knew. A social media test earns its keep when there are two or three good options and a real disagreement about which is best, or when the campaign is big enough that getting it wrong would be costly.
We’re happy to talk through whether it makes sense for you, so get in touch if you’re weighing it up. And if you’re wondering what makes an advert stick once the message is right, we’ve written about what makes a TV ad memorable too.
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