E-Marketing Professionals

Advertising Research

Advertising can be a costly endeavor for businesses. To determine the potential effect their advertising might have on a target audience, businesses often conduct research into the content, the media, and the effectiveness of advertisements before they invest heavily in the advertising campaign. Content research measures how the desired content comes across to an audience sample (a limited number of people).

If the advertisement is pretested, a sample audience may be asked questions after being shown a television commercial or after viewing a layout of a print advertisement. If the advertisements are tested after they have appeared in various media, customers may be asked what they remember about the particular advertisements and how they reacted to them. By pretesting and posttesting customers, marketing researchers can determine whether the desired message is getting across in a positive manner.

Media research involves finding the best mix of media with which to hit a target audience. Marketing researchers may evaluate market stud¬ies of various media outlets (e.g., A. C. Nielsen for electronic media, or W. R. Simmons and Company for print media). By researching the media, marketing researchers can determine how best to allocate marketing dollars to hit the desired market.

To perform advertising effectiveness research, businesses must state what marketing objectives they hope to accomplish with their advertising efforts before they roll out the advertising campaign. Marketing re¬search must be done prior to the advertising campaign so as to have something to measure the results of the advertising against. If a business is trying to increase customer awareness of one of its more overlooked products, then it must determine, before the advertising campaign begins, how well-known that product actually is so that the business will be able to measure how well advertising increases awareness.