There's an old saying that half of all money spent on advertising is wasted. The eternal, career-wrecking dilemma for advertisers is that nobody knows which half.
And yet, with research, there is hope. ACE Metrix, a Los Angeles consulting firm, this month unveiled its online advertising diagnostic, which it calls "the first on-demand TV advertising creative measurement service."
ACE Metrix trots out a lot of analytical language to describe its service -- it all sounds respectably arcane and complicated -- but the bottom line is that the company tells companies whether their commercials are good enough, smart enough -- and whether, in fact, people like them. And in real time, too. The big yardstick the firm offers is something called the "advertising creative effectiveness" (ACE) score, which is a daringly holistic measure of an advertisement's excellence. In other words, does the "creative" work?
Despite generations of focus-group testing and whole industries devoted to consumer response, nobody really has a handle on how effective the creative part of an ad is until it hits the airwaves, and even then it might take months to know whether the ad really worked, which is to say, did it increase sales or awareness. Conversely, if advertisers get a lot of instant feedback on their ads, the buzz is usually bad. Consider the recent failure of Microsoft's first "Bing" spot.
"We're not really scoring the creativity of the ad, per se," says Steve Goldman, who with social scientist JuYoung Lee started the company three years ago. "We're isolating the quality of the messaging." And yet, he adds, "We've seen the ability of big ideas and great storytelling to move the needle."
The firm's subscription-based service ($100,000 a year and up) essentially diagnoses every new commercial that hits the airwaves, using 500 online respondents corralled by a third party. This is a vastly larger sampling than all but the most ambitious in-house agency focus groups. The survey-takers answer nine shrewdly worded questions that deal with the ads' persuasiveness and "watchability." These results, parsed by age and gender, are fed into the ACE Analyzer's proprietary algorithms that produce scores of 1 to 1,000 in categories such as "desire," "relevance," "change," "attention," "information" and the all-important "likeability."
