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1. Myth:
Marketing (or Advertising) is magic – (often
followed by you can’t research your way to good
advertising).
Reality: Marketing and
Advertising are an investment. Even at face
value, the $300 Billion invested by companies
into advertising and marketing should not be
spent based on hunch or “magic”. Not when your
spend can be analyzed, measured and most
importantly, IMPROVED upon.
When research is done right it will validate the
“magic that works”, and stop ideas that won’t
work before money is wasted.
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2. Myth: Ad
Recall (A consumer’s recall of having seen an
Advertisement) is a good predictor of an
advertisement’s success
Reality: Nope. Not
true and Never was. There is enough research
support today to prove that Advertising is
processed by consumers in the low attention
mode.
That means that consumers may be influenced by
an ad even when they do not remember seeing it.
In addition, some consumers who are interested
in your brand answer ad recall survey questions
differently than those less interested in your
brand, which makes interpreting ad recall info
next to meaningless and prone to false
interpretations (a problem documented decades
ago and labeled Reeves Fallacy).
All this means Ad Recall is not a good predictor
of advertising success. So what should be
measured to predict Advertising’s impact? Read
What Sticks and find out. |
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3. Myth:
Branding can’t be measured.
Reality: This is
perhaps the most pervasive and the craziest
notion we’ve come across in advertising. Without
spending 20 pages on defining branding, suffice
to say that branding’s general goal is to create
change in a consumer’s opinions and attitudes.
Change can be measured.
It’s the old adage, what can’t be measured,
can’t be improved. Based on what we’ve seen from
the 30 blue chip marketers in What Sticks
branding can be improved by proper measurement.
Read What Sticks to learn how to effectively
measure your branding. |
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4. Myth: The
Campaign got a lot of publicity, therefore it
was successful.
Reality: Maybe it is
natural – with lack of quick feedback on how a
campaign is doing, marketers default to using
whatever is positive bolster internal support
for their marketing. If they get some good
press, they point to that as evidence that their
campaign must be working. It’s not bad to either
want, or to get, press attention for an Ad
campaign. However, the real question is, “Was
that the agreed to universal goal of the
campaign and should it be the primary
consideration of success”? You must also
consider the impact of that publicity in
changing consumer’s attitudes and ultimately its
impact on sales.
We have rarely seen publicity be the upfront
goal, yet some advertisers and agencies judge
the back end success of the campaign on just
that metric.
One of the biggest mistakes we see the vast
majority of marketers consistently make is that
they don’t start out with a universal agreement
of the specific goals of a campaign.
But why is agreement on the campaign goals so
important? Read Part II. It’s something you can
change tomorrow at your company |
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5. Myth:
Advertising doesn’t work until the consumer sees
it at least three times (commonly referred to as
the 3+ effective frequency)
Reality:
This is
simply hogwash. It violates the basic “laws of
physics” as to how consumers learn and how
advertising works. In fact, there is no
scientific support for this notion and yet we
repeatedly find it articulated as campaign
strategy.
Read the chapter on Media Mechanics paying
particular attention to the concept of
diminishing returns. |
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6. Myth:
Focus Groups are an important research tool for
developing Advertising messaging that really
works
Reality: This is where
some Ad Agencies can make the biggest fatal
mistake.
We’ve seen marketers & agencies take one
consumer comment from a not so random selection
of consumers in a forced environment (the focus
group room) and turn it into either the support
for the campaign or the campaign itself without
any further confirmation that the “gleaned”
consumer motivation is right. Or is right for a
large enough group or that the consumers
actually take away the right messaging based on
that focus group insight. There are many
pitfalls here.
This is not to say focus groups are bad, they
aren’t. In fact, they are an important part of
the process, but they not the entire process.
Marketers need to make a concerted effort to
prove that the consumer motivation and ad
message is actually having the impact intended.
See our Appendix to understand the role of Focus
Groups in research. |
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7. Myth: Media plans need to “get the job
done” in each medium before adding another
medium
Reality: Really, this
is just silly. Consumers don’t participate in
media this way so we are not sure why
advertising would. Consumers have a mix of many
different media habits and advertising needs to
present the messaging mix. The concepts of
diminishing returns and surround sound marketing
really blow this concept of out of the water.
See the Chapter on Media Mechanics to understand
why this is, well, silly |
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8. Myth: The
best Marketers, given the immense knowledge they
have about their Brands, are best able to judge
the advertising they develop for their brands.
Reality: Nada. In
fact, this is probably at the root of why many
advertisements don’t work. The presumption that
a marketer can look at their own ads and judge
their effectiveness is deadly. It is incredibly
rare to have a marketer or agency person that is
either representative of a brand’s consumer (in
our experience, this is especially true of those
that work in advertising in NYC) or can separate
themselves from the process, and knowledge they
have to see their own advertisements as the
consumer interprets them.
Marketers are simply not able to view their ads
in the same way, with the same history as
consumers and therefore are not good,
independent bell weathers for what works.
Look at the early chapters on why advertising
fails to really understand why. |
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9. Myth:
Research hurts creativity in advertising
Reality:
Old world
rearview mirror advertising can be a problem,
but research can also enhance creativity and
improve results. Question whether you have the
right research; a healthy challenging of any
data input is valuable. However, Marketing
Evolution’s ROMO research is indicative of a new
generation of research that is demonstrating
significant value to marketers. Some marketers
simply rule out all research and this misses a
valuable weapon in the war to produce effective
advertising.
Marketers and agency people mistrust research
for two reasons, 1) research in advertising is
used the way a drunkard uses a lamppost, more
for support than illumination and, 2) they have
been mislead by bad or faulty research in the
past. We hope What Sticks will transform the
marketing world’s view of research by ushering
in a new way to apply the gold standard of
overall research (design of experiments) and the
gold standard of advertising research
(continuous tracking).
See the early chapters in Part I to understand
where Advertisers go wrong with Research and
ensure you don’t. |
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10. Myth: A
“Big Idea” is critical for the success of a
marketing or advertising campaign.
Reality:
The
single-minded drive to the Big Idea is probably
the biggest misperception in advertising today
and the one concept that often derails a
campaign off the tracks. It’s not that a Big
Idea is a bad idea. In fact, a Big Idea should
be constantly strived for.
The truth? Advertising that communicates to a
solid consumer motivation that appeals to a
large segment with messaging that is effective
is the real determinate of advertising success.
Layering on a Big Idea that really captures the
hearts and minds of consumers only accelerates
already good advertising.
This concept is the underpinning of What Sticks
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