Why Surrounding Context Matters
– because if they like the program, there's a better chance they'll like your ad
Remember why people watch TV? To see programs, not ads
For decades the media environment has been quite simple. Since the beginnings of ad testing in the 1960s, television has dominated clients' budgets and creative considerations. With relatively few programs, channels and programming types to choose from, and lacking the tools to make an informed choice, advertisers generally took what they were given. Targeting a TV campaign was a rough science, at best; the norm was to seek maximum exposure for the allowed budget, so heavy overlaps in exposure from one program to the next have also been the norm. This relates also to highly wasteful practice of purchasing of excessive frequency.
Whether they wanted to or not, most viewers would get to see most of the ads on TV and see them more often than necessary. Creative targets, core market targets, peripheral target audiences as well as non-users or category rejecters would all be exposed to the campaign. Not only is this wasteful, it has had an unknown impact on the effect of the advertising, since there was little or no control over which programs the ad would be seen in. Why is this important? Because recent research shows that if a person likes the program, the ads in it more likely to work.
An elephant in the living room
During these decades, from the perspective of companies testing the ads, the context in which the ad was delivered (the program clutter it was inserted into), although believed intuitively to be important, was too hard to control and somewhat unimportant as a test variable. This made some sense because so much contextual blurring happened anyway once an ad went on air, it would have been all but impossible to act on the results of a contextual analysis anyway. People would see ad within many different programs, so controlling the program type in a copy test was an unnecessary and technically cumbersome complication. All leading copy testing systems, if using a clutter reel, therefore standardized the context by using one, or a very limited number of TV programs in which to embed the test ad. Ironically, they did this in order to reduce the variance in results caused by program type rather than properly using that variance to do better analysis .
Ignoring the context of advertising is now a liability for any advertiser. Viewers have more choice than ever, TV no longer has a monopoly on our attention, the internet is allowing us to be more discerning about content – an audience right which has implications for other media. It is no longer true that TV reaches just about everyone. Leakage in media plans (the gap between planned reach and actual exposure) gets higher as more non-TV choices become available and is more serious for those people who lack the time to watch TV or who have the extra resources needed to enjoy other kinds of entertainment. Try capturing users of high end mobile phones through TV – a typical campaign will miss more targets than it hits.
Boost or bash
Advertisers are now catching on. Not only do they want to make good ads, but they recognize that consumers can exercise choice and that the programming chosen by the viewer plays a part in the ultimate effect of the ad. This age old but newly acknowledged role of context has been loosely labeled as “engagement” :
“Turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context”.
Advertising Research Foundation, 2006
Advertising Research Foundation, 2006
And researchers are now proving that engagement matters.
“A stronger level of emotional engagement with the MTV program was found to be related to a stronger level of response to the embedded advertising… Good advertisements are strengthened by the emotional surround of the program content, but good program content cannot compensate for a weak advertising concept.”
Cunningham, T., Hall, A.S., Young, C. “The Advertising Magnifier Effect: An MTV Study”. Journal of Advertising Research, 46, 4 (2006): 369-380
But this then raises a problem for copy testing: if the surrounding context (whether it is programming, editorial or other content) plays a role in the effectiveness of an ad, what does that mean for the results of copy tests? It means that test ads embedded in programming which appeals to the ad’s target audience, are likely to get better scores. An ad for shampoo is likely to have an advantage over an ad for a mobile phone, all things being equal, if they are both tested in a system which uses a soap opera as the TV program clutter. That’s because mobile phone users are more likely to find a soap opera boring. To get a fair result for the mobile phone ad, you’d need to embed it in a program which has a level of appeal that is similar to that of a soap opera to housewives. Which brings us to another red herring: do all housewives in a copy test really like soap operas? Of course not. Even for audiences which are thought to be homogenous, the context is not neutral.
How can any copy test system reliably claim to assess an ad’s “in-market effect” if the system ignores the “boost or bash” effect exerted by the program on the ad? Leading copy test systems today either do not measure surrounding context (eg. Millward Brown) or simplify that context to the point where it does not represent reality (eg. TNS, Ipsos, GfK, MSW). These systems have been around for years, the companies that run them rely on huge norm databases, but the 1960s to 1980s reality that is still being recreated by those systems is not the arena that today’s advertisers compete in.
If advertisers want to make more competitive ads for today’s audiences, they need a copy test that enables them to exploit the surrounding context to the benefit of their brand.
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