Principles of Integrated Marketing Communications An Evidence-based Approach

This chapter is about evaluating the effectiveness of an ad and the subsequent campaign. This is an important chapter because a bad ad can hurt a brand even with a single exposure, and a good ad of the same brand can outsell a bad one by about four times, even given the same media expenditure. Therefore, at the very least, we should think of ad evaluation as a risk-reduction exercise! We discuss how to formally evaluate one’s ad, first in situ, when we assess the ad in a strict experimental control condition, and then in vivo, when we track the effectiveness of the ad in the field. But before either of these, a marcoms manager can systematically judge (guided by theory) whether the ad is easy to understand, whether the ad elicits the right brand and associations, and finally, whether it is persuasive. We will discuss how to do this, including assessing the ROI of ad pre-testing, and the synergistic effects.