What’s happening
- More than four in ten entrants to the IPA Effectiveness Awards are using quant pre-testing – and 51% of winners.
- Previous analysis of the IPA Databank by Peter Field has shown that quant pre-testing increasingly promotes emotional campaigns: between 1998 and 2022, the proportion of campaigns that were emotional and that used quant pre-testing almost doubled, from 33% to 60%; the rate of increase for emotional campaigns that didn’t use such pre-testing was much lower, rising just 11 percentage points to 53%.
- In a related finding, campaigns that used quant pre-testing were more likely to have greater market share effects than those that weren’t tested: between 1998 and 2022, the percentage of pre-tested campaigns reporting very large market share growth hovered around the 30-33% mark, but but non-tested campaigns registered a decline over the same period, from 39% to 26%.
- Pre-testing also more than doubled the proportion of cases reporting very large pricing power growth (from 4% to 10%), while that figure halved for those not pre-testing (from 9% to 4%).
Why pre-testing matters
There is a growing correlation between pre-testing and emotional outcomes – and since emotional outcomes are linked to more effective advertising that leads in turn to a better correlation between pre-testing and commercial impact.
It’s interesting to consider this conclusion in the light of the recent AI-generated Coca-Cola Christmas ad, which scored highly in pre-testing but which attracted some sharp criticism on social media once people understood its genesis.
A measured response came in a recent APG event from Guy Murphy, founder of Extreme Strategy, who said: “Potentially that’s more of a test of AI being able to just reproduce an executional formula than create a brand-new ad or campaign – so we should watch this space and see what it can do”.
Sourced from IPA, Adweek, WARC
Source: warc.com
