Ad folk call for market researchers to come clean

An article from Australia says that the advertising industry has called for market researchers to "come clean". They have been accused of "dubious science, double standards and a lack of accountablilty for refusing to disclose how many ad campaigns that they altered during concept development succeeded or failed".

"It's not the creative people who are responsible for the rubbish going on TV," Clemenger's creative director, Danny Searle, said during a robust debate at a Fairfax-backed screening of the 2005 winners from the Cannes International Advertising Festival.

"What's happening is our opinions are put down to subjectivity and market research is put down to a science. The big problem is it's not a science. There are as many misses out of research as there are hits. And just as we've heard tonight, it depends on the market researcher, it depends on stimuli, it depends on a whole lot of iffy variables.

"The problem we have is to convince our clients that what they are buying for their $40,000 a pop [for pre-testing an ad] isn't science. There are as many failures in research as there are in creativity. It still takes a leap of faith at the end."

Mr Searle criticised global research groups including AC Nielsen, Millward Brown and TNS for a lack of transparency in refusing to release their top-scoring ads for creative agencies to refer to as benchmarks .

Rob Belgiovane, BWM's executive creative director and a film judge this year at Cannes, said researchers needed to commit to public disclosure. "We need a system that basically tells us of all the ads tested by which research companies, which ads succeeded and which ones failed," he said. "We would very quickly have a measure of who the hot researchers are versus the dud researchers."

[...snip...]

Millward Brown's Dr Doyle said some of the criticism levelled at market researchers was justified, particularly with quantitative testing methods, including his company's well-known Link test.

"We've taken a long hard look at how our data is used," he said. "We are increasingly beginning to realise that Link in itself is a very innocuous tool as most qualitative copy testing is. The danger is in how this tool is used …

"As we all know, clients can hide behind research at times, or perhaps the decision-making driven by financial considerations where they will err on the side of certainty."

Quantitative testing techniques such as Link, TNS's AdEval, Nielsen's Ads@work and ASI from Ipsos all attribute pre-launch scores to advertising concepts. Many large companies will proceed with ads only if they pass certain benchmarks.

Dr Doyle said that approach was wrong. "Research is not a problem. It's more a problem with how it's used. So anyone who's naive enough to say it's a bad advert because it scores 3.5 as to 3.7 clearly is wrong."

He also called for more collaboration with the creative sector in the research process.

Another research panellist, TNS's business development head, Darren Kemp, said he was "intrigued" by the level of antagonism between creatives and researchers in Australia. He arrived two weeks ago from London, where he was global head of strategy planning for Diageo.

"It seems to me a bit of skin in the game needs to happen - getting some researchers more involved or a bit more accountable. It feels like it's very transactional. I'd like possibly a bit more involvement early on where the research is challenged."