Keeping the faith (2) (page 1 of 3)

And there is much research to support this argument - but it presupposes you are running the right advertising in the first place; and without the research spend in development, pretesting, and tracking, how can you be reassured that you have the right advertising?

Throughout the 25 years I have been in research in the region it has always fascinated me how rarely agencies have been asked this question. Accountability rarely seems to surface. In fact I have always felt that there is a dual standard operating here somewhere. It has always amazed me how ready clients have been to spend an extra few $100,000 on the media budget or even shooting a new ad, but have been relatively reluctant to spend a few $1,000 researching the likely effectiveness of the next campaign concept.

Historically in the Middle East ad agencies and specialist media buying units have prepared media plans on data that few of the stakeholders actually have much faith in. Certainly not the clients. I shudder to think how much money - millions of dollars - has been mis-spent in media budgets in this time. The ad agencies have done very little to improve the situation. Some would argue it is not in their best interests to do so, and anyway, as I've suggested, so few clients appear to hold them accountable.

From time to time there have been calls for a drastic improvement in the authenticity of audience and readership measurement data in the region. Just recently Committees for such action have been formed again. Déjà vu? This time they say it's going to be different. Let's hope so and that this time all parties are more committed and the much needed improvements follow.

And what about some objective or at least research-based means of measuring the creative? Doubts about the quality of creative in advertising in the Middle East is another old chestnut - which has also recently risen to the surface again.

It is a fact of life that not all ads are created equal. Yet, also rarely in my 25 years' experience have I heard of an ad agency actually being held accountable for the quality of their creative. If only a small proportion of all the wasted media budgets had been invested in ad development or pretesting. After all, if you do not get the ad right in the first place then how much you spend on the media budget is unlikely to make much difference.

When faced with calls for pretesting, ad agencies often claim that research kills creativity. What the agencies actually mean is that research sometimes kills off creative campaign concepts they hoped to persuade their clients to use. But what does creativity count for if the advertisement is not going to work with the intended target audience?

In 1995 in the USA Professor John Philip Jones published the results of a research study using 'single source' data i.e. he tracked a sample of 2,000 households over 2 years for their daily TV watching and fmcg purchases of 78 advertised brands over the following 7 days. Something we would not be able to do here in the Gulf ; we recently relaunched our Household Panel in Saudi Arabia, but there has been no investment so far anywhere in the region in the TV meters necessary for the Prof. Jones study. (As referred to earlier, maybe that is about to change.)

Prof. Jones's study showed that -

• for one in every 5 ads the brand almost doubled its share of market
• for two in every 5 ads there was a noticeable effect of +12 to +30% market share for these brands
• for one in every 5 ads there was no measurable effect in brand share

and

• for one in every 5 ads the effect was actually negative i.e.