Does television advertising have better recall /awareness (prompted and unprompted) than other
media?
Does television advertising have more power to convert awareness into action, for example, a
purchase?
In order to gain insight into the effectiveness of past marketing activities, marketers use
intermediate measures such as brand and advertising awareness, perceptions and attitudes.
A common way to measure advertising awareness is to ask people if they remember seeing
the advertisement for a specific brand. This form of advertising awareness remains one of
the core metrics used in advertising tracking because it can generate a) top-of-mind, b) total
unprompted and c) prompted advertising awareness. Those three measures are used to
assess overall advertising effectiveness – for all three advertising awareness measures,
consumers have a higher propensity to remember the advertising of brands they use than
non-users. Overall, brand users can more easily remember the advertising experience as
past experiences with the brand mean that it has an established place within the memory
providing context for refreshing and reinforcing memory structures when exposed to
advertising. Contrarily, non-users require additional prompting to remember brand
advertising exposure (Romaniuk & Wight, 2009).
Recall is one of the key measures used in advertising effectiveness testing, along with others
such as persuasion and advertising liking. Recall measurement should be able to tap into a
person’s memory and the emotional response in the initial attentioning process should
therefore influence recall (Mehta & Purvis, 2006). Concluding, effective advertising is that
which is personally meaningful, culturally relevant and which creates a subjective feeling of
warmth and positive affect. Advertising must arouse some emotion in order to be effective:
Triggering meaningful emotional responses is key in branding as consumers decision-making
processes around brands have a heavy emotion-based dimension to them (Gordon, 2006;
Mehta & Purvis, 2006).
Related abstracts
Empirical Evidence of TV Advertising Effectiveness
Rubinson, J. (2009). "Empirical Evidence of TV Advertising Effectiveness." Journal of
Advertising Research 49(2): 220
Reports in trade journals have suggested that TV advertising has lost effectiveness. Reasons
for this suggestion are the ability of viewers to control their viewing of TV commercials using
DVR’s, reports by Forrester Research in 2007 that over half of consumers do not like TV
advertising and would prefer it did not exist, the increase in TV commercial clutter as well as
a shift in media consumption patterns and the more compelling nature of Internet
advertising.
Rubinson tested three hypotheses in order to evaluate if the effectiveness of TV advertising
has declined over time. However, the evidence assembled in this paper does not support
accepting any of the three hypotheses. Moreover, it found that TV’s effectiveness is stable
or even increasing because marketers are getting better at deciding when to use TV in light
of a growing number of media available. Overall, the continued effectiveness of TV
advertising depends on its adaptability to new trends, such as interactive television.
The influence of brand usage on response to advertising awareness measures
Romaniuk, J. and S. Wight (2009). "The influence of brand usage on responses to advertising
awareness measures." International Journal of Market Research 51(2): 203-218.
In order to gain insight into the effectiveness of past marketing activities, marketers use
intermediate measures such as brand and advertising awareness, perceptions and attitudes.
A common way to measure advertising awareness is to ask people if they remember seeing
the advertisement for a specific brand. This form of advertising awareness remains one of
the core metrics used in advertising tracking because it can generate a) top-of-mind, b) total
unprompted and c) prompted advertising awareness. Those three measures are used to
assess overall advertising effectiveness.
In this study, a total of 4,122 respondents participated in telephone interviews. The findings
suggest that for all three advertising awareness measures, consumers have a higher
propensity to remember the advertising of brands they use than non-users. This is because
past experience with the brand means that it has an established place within the memory
providing context for refreshing and reinforcing memory structures when exposed to
advertising. Therefore, brand users can more easily remember the experience. Using
unprompted and top-of-mind methods, brand users were 2.5 times more likely to recall
seeing advertising than non-users, while for the brand-prompted measure this reduced to
1.7. Concluding, non-users require additional prompting to remember brand advertising
exposure.
Use real-time ad tracking to fully capture all touchpoints
Blackden, E. (2009). Use real-time ad tracking to fully capture all touchpoints. Admap, 44(3)
503, 46-47.
Marketing spend is continuing to fragment. Forrester Research has forecast that between
2005 and 2010, nearly half of US marketers will have shifted spend away from traditional
channels, such as TV, newspapers, magazines and direct mail, in favor of the digital space.
Industry analysts estimate the growth of mobile advertising will continue to skyrocket, with
an estimated growth of around 500% expected in the next 5 years.
Another recent study by Jack Morton Worldwide predicted that 75% of marketers across the
US, UK, Europe, China and Australia will be increasing spend in experiential marketing.
Recall methodologies only capture events that have made the journey into long-term
memory, leaving a large part of the experience framework unaccounted for. Contrarily, realtime data collects what actually happened, and not just what the respondent remembers, it
will naturally deliver a more accurate understanding of what the consumer has experienced.
Recall: relies on memory, distorted view of events, cannot recall emotion
Real-time: captures experiences as they happen, more accurate view of events, emotion
captured in real-time > no need to recall
What Do Consumers Do Emotionally with Advertising?
Gordon, W. (2006). "What Do Consumers Do Emotionally with Advertising?" Journal of
Advertising Research 46(1): 2-10.
The article attempts to evaluate “what people do with advertising”. Drawing on the
discipline of social anthropology, the author states that advertising creates social
identification and cohesion and offers a shared symbolic language for communication in
different contexts. Additionally, using another article as basis, the author mentions that
likeability can be seen as one of the important predictors of sales effectiveness. Likeability is
a complex concept made up of five main factors: ingenuity, meaningful and worth
remembering, energetic and lively, warm and sensitive as well as it does not “rub the wrong
way”. Furthermore, likeability is the gatekeeper for further processing of advertisements.
Overall, effective advertising is that which is personally meaningful, culturally relevant and
which creates a subjective feeling of warmth and positive affect.
Reconsidering Recall and Emotion in Advertising
Mehta, A. and S. C. Purvis (2006). "Reconsidering Recall and Emotion in Advertising." Journal
of Advertising Research 46(1): 49-56
Recall is one of the key measures used in advertising effectiveness testing, along with others
such as persuasion and advertising liking. It has been known for long that advertising must
arouse some emotion to be effective: Triggering meaningful emotional responses is key in
branding as consumers decision-making processes around brands have a heavy emotionbased dimension to them.
With regards to recall, the Advertising Research Foundation Copy Validity Research Project
has found recall to be a valid measure of advertising effectiveness, second only to
advertising liking. Recall measurement should be able to tap into a person’s memory and the
emotional response in the initial attentioning process should therefore influence recall. The
article attempts to evaluate the correlation between recall and attention. The authors found
that there is a moderately high and positive correlation between recall and attention
obtained from recognition of the advertising via re-exposure to the actual advertising and
not via a description of the advertising in words. Furthermore, recall and liking are also
positively linked. Overall, the authors concluded by stating that recall and any type of
emotion are interconnected (attention as well as liking).
Measuring the hidden power of emotive advertising
Heath, R. and P. Hyder (2005). "Measuring the hidden power of emotive advertising."
International Journal of Market Research 47(5): 467-486.
Advertising has far more power than people think it has. 13 years of IPA Advertising
Effectiveness Awards have proved beyond doubt that advertising does affect consumers,
whether they believe it or not. In order to measure advertising effectiveness, methods such
as surveys, questions that invite people to recall things as well as other metrics are used. The
authors of this paper focus on recall measures in general and ‘claimed ad awareness’ in
particular. The study with 318 respondents resulted in supporting the theory that advertising
which relies upon affect (i.e. that mainly influences emotions and feelings) is likely to benefit
from longer periods of repeat exposure. The research also supports the hypothesis that
recall-based metrics such as claimed ad awareness are likely to seriously underestimate the
effectiveness of advertising that relies on affect. Concluding, the effect that advertising has
on consumers’ emotions and feelings is largely unknown to them, which is why the authors
used the term “the hidden power of advertising” to describe it. However, advertising that
relies on affect is increasingly common.