TACKING STUDIES

When a campaign is running, its impact is often monitored via a tracking study. Periodic sampling of the target audience provides a time trend of measures of interest. The purpose is to evaluate and reassess the advertising campaign and perhaps tracked are advertisement awareness, awareness of elements of the advertisement, brand awareness, beliefs about brand attributes, brand image ratings, occasions of use, and brand preference. For durables such as cars, consumers are asked what brands they would consider buying on their next purchase, and what brand they are most likely to buy next. Of particular interest is knowing how the campaign is affecting the brand, as apposed to how the advertisement is communicating.

Figure 11.4 shows tracking of an advertising campaign directed at children for a beverage product. Personal interview were held with children from six to twelve years old. They were shown visual stimuli such as pictures of brand packaging or line drawing of advertising characters. The interest was in the “main character,” who was the personification of the brand and playback of the “Story” of the advertising, the main creative element.

The successful campaign of year I was expanded with additional executions which apparently did not have comparable impact. The disappointing results of years 2 led to a fresh round of copy development aimed at making it more “modern” and “relevant” for kids. However, the decline continued in year 3. An analysis of verbatim playback suggested that the main character’s actions were too predictable and new were developed which placed it in a more heroic role, “rescuing” children in adventurous situation. In year 4, the main character measure turned up. For the next season, the campaign used situations from a child’s real life to attempt to make the advertising more relevant. The result in year 5 was a dramatic increase in recall of the central creative element and an important increase in two other measures. The tracking program provided in this case actionable information over time, allowing the advertising to be adjusted around the same theme to become more effective.

The Eric Marder firm provides one approach to obtaining tracking data without doing customized studies. They maintain a paned of 3,000 women from 1,000 areas. Each woman keeps a record of all television commercial she sees in the course of one randomly assigned day each month. Before watching television on her assigned day, she records her buying intention for each product category. On the assigned day she watches television normally except that she records the time, the channel, and the brand advertised from every ad she sees, and her buying intention immediately after exposure. The received message (RMs) are defined as the total number of commercials recorded per 100 women. The persuasion rate (PR) is defined as the net percent of the RM that produces a shift in buying intention from some other brand to the advertised brand. Subscribers obtain quarterly reports of the RM ad PR from all competing brands in the product class.