[Previously] I said beware of people who claim there is no relationship between ad recall and effectiveness. They miss the point! If you hear this from a researcher, get yourself another researcher, quick! When we ask questions about peoples’ memory for ads, it is not because anybody believes that ads have to be recalled to be effective. Rather the reason is that the memory questions aid our diagnosis of why, when we find that an ad is not working. They are not included as judges – but as interpretive assistants.

In this column we tackle the question of how to measure advertising recall in order to give you maximum diagnostic power.

Recognition Versus Recall

There are many ways of asking about ad recall but at the risk of oversimplifying, they fall into two main categories:

* Have you seen this ad? (Recognition)

* What ads do you recall seeing for shampoo? (Spontaneous recall)If your ad is not working (as assessed by changes in behaviour and/or attitudes) you need information from both these measures in order to diagnose why – so that you can take the necessary corrective action. (On the other hand, if it is your competitor’s ad the why is not as important.)

Process of Elimination

If you are not getting the desired effect from your ad, you need to go through a diagnosis process. Is the problem because:

1. people haven’t been exposed to the ad? (a reach problem)

2. they are exposed but the ad did not register? (a mental reach problem)

3. the ad registered but the brand didn’t? (a branding problem)

4. the ad registered but the message didn’t? (a message take-out problem)

5. the ad registered but they have forgotten about it? (a salience problem)The analysis you need to conduct, in order to tease out what is the problem, is like a process of elimination and uses several types of recall and media information.

1. Identifying a Reach Problem

How do you know if it is a reach problem? Easy. By post-analysing the media schedule comparing actual versus planned reach.

If the actual (cumulative) reach for the ad is equal to or better than the planned reach for that period, then you can eliminate media (reach) scheduling as the problem. Having eliminated reach we then move on to check on mental reach.

2. Identifying a Mental Reach Problem

How do you identify a mental reach problem? This means people had the opportunity to see the ad but it did not mentally register. The best measure to use here is recognition because we humans are very good at recognising if we have seen something before. Just one exposure of an ad is usually enough for us to be able to recognise it – provided we are paying at least some attention to it.

Best is to show people colour photo-shots from the ad and ask them if they recall having seen the ad (in the last week/recently/ever)? [When using telephone interviewing this calls for adaptation techniques which can be successfully implemented in the case of many if not most ads. But that is another subject in itself.]

There is almost always some gap between reach and mental reach. The size of this gap depends on the attention getting ability of the ad as well as the media scheduling. People watching the program take coffee or toilet breaks during the ads. Even among those sitting with their eyes on the ad, on average about 30% of them will be mentally tuned out (see Adnews June 3, 1994 “They see your ad, but does it get through?). The gap is caused by one group being physically absent while the other group is mentally absent.

Consider a media schedule that targets a cumulative reach of 90% over a 3 week period. How many of these did it actually reach mentally? The recognition figure is the best indicator. It tells you how many of the target audience can recognise having seen the ad?

3. Identifying a Message Take-out Problem

If all is OK with reach and all is OK with mental reach, the problem may be the message. How do you identify a problem of message take-out?

Simply by asking people who claim to have seen the ad (as measured by recognition) ‘what the ad was trying to communicate’. In this way you can check their message take-out. If message take-out is OK then on to the next step – branding.

4. Identifying a Branding Problem

The ad and the message may have registered but if the brand didn’t, what good is it?. You can have the greatest ad in the world and a world beater of a message – but unless it is being stored in memory with a mental connection to the brand itself, then it is all a waste of time.

So how do you know if the ad registered but the brand didn’t? When asking about recognition it is usually possible to ‘mask out’ the brand name on the ad photo-shots that are shown to the respondent. People claiming to recognise that advertising execution are then asked ‘what brand was being advertised?’.

5. Identifying a Salience Problem

How do we know when the frequency and flighting of media, as distinct from achieving a certain level of reach, is the problem? Another way of putting this is: how do we know if the ad, brand and message, have registered – but the mental connections established are too weak in peoples’ minds to be effective?

Enter from stage left a key reason for including the second type of measure – spontaneous recall. Questions like ‘what ads do you recall seeing for shampoo?’.

Establishing that there is a memory network corresponding to the ad (execution, message and brand) is one thing. The strength of these mental connections is another. Recognition is in a sense an ‘easy’ test. It confirms that the ad does have some representation in our memory network.

Spontaneous recall questions are necessary because recognition won’t identify this strength of connection problem. Remember this is not judge and jury stuff – our purpose is one of accurate diagnosis in order to be able to fix the problem. To assess the strength of the mental connections we need to use spontaneous recall. Such spontaneous recall questions must naturally be sequenced before recognition in the order of questions in the questionnaire.

I will devote my next column to analysing this problem of salience and the exact questions you need to ask to get indications of the strength of each of the important mental connections. For the moment it is important to understand why spontaneous measures must be used. And to understand why there are times when they have to be used even without recognition.

Practical Limitation

As a general rule recognition should ideally be included wherever possible – in order to provide the capability to assess mental reach. The problem is that this is not always possible.

To show photo-shots of every ad, for every brand, for the full product category, is usually far too time prohibitive – not to mention fatiguing for the respondent. To do so would usually crowd out much of the other questioning that needs to be included on other important matters. As a result the general rule is that recognition can only be accommodated for the client’s ads. As for the competitors ads, it is important to know if they are working (and this is assessed by reference to behaviour and attitudes). Nice to know but less critical is exactly why those ads are failing. So recognition for them may not be included.

It is simply a real world practical issue.

Measuring Strength of Connections

When we recognise an ad as something we have seen before it tells us that a representation of the ad exists in our mental network. However it reveals nothing about how likely the connections are to be activated in the purchase situation.

The fact is that there are many, many connections in our minds most of which lie dormant and don’t ever influence us because they don’t ever get spontaneously reactivated.

Those of us who are old enough would still recognise that a mental connection exists in our minds between ads with Stewart Wagstaff and the Benson and Hedges brand. (Stewart Wagstaff was the presenter for Benson and Hedges advertising for many years.) That is, we can remember this when we are prompted. We recognise that the connection is still there in our minds but ask yourself how many years is it since that memory saw the light of day?

Recognition measures tell us nothing about the current strength or likelihood of those connections being activated in our minds by everyday events – and especially at the point of purchase. For this we need measures that reflect salience and tell us about the strength of the connections. These spontaneous measures – spontaneous ad recall and spontaneous brand recall – will be the subject of my next column.

Summary

* To assess if an ad is working look for changes in behaviour and attitudes.

* To assess why an ad is failing use the additional diagnostic process.

* This is a process of elimination.

* It should include recognition measures for the client’s brand wherever possible because they tell us if the mental connections have been established (between ad execution – ad message and brand).

* However they don’t tell us anything about the strength of those connections.

* This is why spontaneous recall measures are used as well – to assess the strength of the mental connections.

* It is in the strength of these connections that we find implications for media flighting and frequency – to keep the memory connections fresh.

© Dr. Max Sutherland, Palo Alto California USA All rights reserved.

References

* Giep Franzen, Advertising Effectiveness: Findings from Empirical Research, NTC Publications, Oxfordshire, 1994.

* John Philip Jones, When Ads Work, Lexington Books, NY, 1995.

* Max Sutherland, Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer, Allen & Unwin, 1993.

Dr. Max Sutherland is a marketing psychologist and business consultant in California’s Silicon Valley as well as adjunct professor of marketing at the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship.