For advertisers, the changing media landscape means there are more ways to reach consumers with advertising than ever before, with a steady shift to online formats. At the same time, ad budgets have barely grown and development timelines have reduced. In this demanding new environment, advertisers and agencies need fresh approaches to ad-testing in order to:
- Boost efficiency (cost and time)
- Leverage learnings across media
- Mine insights across and within ads and campaigns
- Accommodate new and emerging ad formats
Advertisers now need earlier-stage, media agnostic ad concept tests and more efficient screening of final creative, with tighter integration of pre-testing and in-market performance learnings.
Ad-testing that’s flexible, efficient in every way and just plain fast
GfK has responded to these needs with a comprehensive and dynamic learning system, Ad Fit Optimizer. It is a breakthrough approach that combines speed, low cost and behavioural measurement.
Using intuitive assessment criteria to deliver:
- Early concept and creative evaluation
- Low-cost, fast-turnaround screening of finished and semi-finished ads
- A consistent framework for evaluating different advertising media in natural environments
“This is the ad-testing breakthrough I was looking for – flexible, efficient in every way, and just plain fast. Kudos to GfK for delivering a truly digital solution.”
–Josh Billig, Microsoft
This flexible system accommodates not just TV ads, but all forms of online advertising, including video (pre-roll, in-text and in-banner), banners and rich media advertising.
The screening is performed not only across a range of regular, mobile and social media online environments, but also:
- Regular web page and mobile site environments to test a range of shapes and sizes of static, animated and rich media banners, as well as in-text video
- A Facebook-like mobile environment to test a variety of social media ad formats
- A pre-roll-type environment to test video ads across a range of screen sizes
How is it different to ‘normal’ ad-testing?
In line with the latest thinking in cognitive psychology, viewer exposure to ads in an Ad Fit test is unforced; respondents are free to disengage from the ads at any time, as they would be in real life.
We can therefore measure how effective an ad is at ‘hooking’ consumers and ‘holding’ their attention. Most other ad pre-testing systems rely solely on a forced exposure methodology that will struggle to identify an ad’s real ability to break through the clutter in our multi-tasking world.
At the end of the process, all stages of ad testing are integrated into a database, so you can get the bigger picture on what makes your campaigns successful.
What have we learned from Ad-Fit Optimizer?
Let’s not forget that we are approaching the end of the year, with Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas making the intensely cluttered ad environment even more challenging.
So, what are the do’s and don’ts for marketers and advertisers? We used our learnings from Ad Fit Optimizer to help you drive your campaigns with the ultimate guide for driving effective holiday advertising.
