The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) was founded in 1936 with a mission to improve the practice of advertising, marketing, and media research in pursuit of more effective marketing and advertising communications.
True to that mission, during its 80th year in 2016, the ARF launched a major new initiative, “How Advertising Works.”1 The goal was to deliver objective research-based insights that improve advertising and, ultimately, the return on marketing investments (ROI), with actionable insights for marketers in today's media, consumer, and advertising environments.
The study, which is ongoing, is focused on how advertising works today. But it also provides valuable lessons about the history of advertising research and a glimpse into the future of such research. It shows why advertising research has been and always will be a constant process to inform about new issues, advance scholarship, and provide direction for the future.
The ARF's research for the How Advertising Works project has incorporated analyses of industry practices, original research, and comprehensive reviews of relevant studies, including a review of 55 volumes of the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR). We—the ARF research team and the outside practitioners and academics who contributed to the project—concluded that there are enduring principles that have, in the words of past JAR editors, “withstood the test of time” (West, Chiagouris, and Precourt, 2011, p. 2).
It also is clear that there is a constant need to assess whether “foundational advertising theories….remain relevant” in the digital age, in which “mass media dominance” has become a distant memory (Kerr, Schultz, Kitchen, Mulhern, et al., 2015, pp. 390–391). Without this constant reexamination of advertising theory and practice, we would never know which principles are enduring and which are not.
Most important is our conclusion that three factors have been driving advertising research over the past 80 years. They are still the main drivers today and, we believe, will drive advertising research in the future:
the emergence of new advertising platforms
changes related to the consumer
methodology and data source innovation.
DRIVERS OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH
New Advertising Platforms
The history of the ARF demonstrates how the emergence of new media is a strong impulse for new advertising research. During its 80 years, the ARF witnessed the advent of television and digital media and their impact on research. (The JAR started publication in 1960, after print, radio, and television had established themselves as leading advertising media.)
The emergence of new media advertising platforms affects advertising research in several ways:
A new medium must demonstrate that it is an effective advertising platform. Given the abundance of research demonstrating television effectiveness, it is easy to forget that there was a time—the late '40s and early '50s—when U.S. television networks commissioned major studies to establish that television advertising did work.
Before “The Tonight Show” could become a television institution, for example, NBC had to convince advertisers that consumers would respond to commercials viewed while those individuals probably were not at peak alertness. Today, in the 24/7 media world, digital channels' effectiveness is being explored and documented at a feverish pace by academics and practitioners alike. (In 2015, the JAR published more than four times as many papers on the impact of digital media than on television.)
New media bring new advertising formats and creative possibilities. They, too, have to be studied to assess that they work, how they work, and how they can be optimized. (The How Advertising Works project included research on the efficacy of made-for-television advertisements on other platforms and the optimization of mobile and social-media advertising.)
When a new medium emerges and is able to demonstrate its effectiveness, some advertisers are able to increase their advertising budgets. In most cases, however, at least some money is moved from an “old” medium to the new one. This drives competitiveness between the media and a lot of research to demonstrate that a specific medium works well for the advertiser. Similarly, research on specific content types, such as the Super Bowl, the Olympics, (or even regular television series)—and research on magazine types and music formats—is conducted to support pricing, as this author found in earlier investigations (Stipp, 1991; Stipp and Schiavone, 1990, 1996).
Competition between media is an important driver of advertising research, but it does not always advance objectivity in research design and data interpretation. The JAR and the ARF, whose membership includes all sides of the equation (advertisers, agencies, research providers, and academics), play an important role by advocating high research-quality standards and objectivity. For example, The ARF's Foundations of Quality 2 study, launched in 2010, sought to explore and identify methodologies and best practices to improve the accuracy of online survey research. How Advertising Works has produced additional insights to help advertisers optimize advertising on all platforms by identifying the specific strengths of each advertising platform and format.
As consumers increasingly use a variety of media (sometimes simultaneously), cross-platform advertising strategies are a particularly effective way to reach and influence today's consumers. This strategy has prompted major research initiatives on how advertising in different media and through different advertising formats interacts and how such interactions can be optimized (Aleksandrovs, Goos, Dens, and De Pelsmacker, 2015; Klapdor, Anderi, Schumann, and von Wangenheim, 2015; Neijens and Voorveld, 2015; Yuki, 2015).
Consumer Change
Advertisers strive to reach their consumer targets and drive consumers' attitudes about brands and their purchase behavior. As a result, advertisers rely on research to know where they can reach and how they can influence consumers—a tall order given that media exposure and consumers' mindsets are moving targets.
Changes in shopping behavior have prompted ample new investigation, especially during the most recent decade when online search and shopping were evolving;
The economy drives consumers' response to advertising, as do demographic and sociological trends (e.g., marriage patterns, birth rates, and immigration). Changes in these factors create opportunities for research to explore their implications for marketers.
When it comes to the creative message, consumers' values, attitudes, and aspirations are paramount. On the basis of new evidence from How Advertising Works about the importance of creative content, it is safe to conclude that identifying a brand's target group's values and aspirations is a prerequisite for effective advertising. There has been a lot of focus on understanding millennials; before that it was on Generation X and Baby Boomers. Generation Z—tweens, teens, and college-age kids in 2016—have to become the next generational focus.2 It is also important, however, to assess the implications of changing attitudes among all segments of society, for example,
about race and ethnicity (this is covered extensively in the JAR's special package on multicultural advertising; September, 2014), but also
about trends in fashion, style, and music to creative messages that resonate with the consumer.
Despite the need to keep up with the changing consumer, some advertising has, in fact, withstood the test of time. Coca-Cola has used its now iconic Santa Claus, on and off, for nearly 100 years.3 This is a reminder that—although we always need to assess the implications of societal and consumer change—we should never assume that past insights about consumer response to advertising are invalid.
Methodology and Data Source Innovation
The emergence of new methods and data sources sometimes receives less attention but can have a massive impact on practice and theory.
One of the best examples of the impact of new data on marketing practice is the advent of scanner data in the ‘80s, when the availability of timely, granular measures of the short-term impact of marketing tactics on sales prompted a dramatic shift from advertising to price discounting and trade promotion spending (Fulgoni, 2013). In other words, the arrival of precise short-term data led many marketers to ignore the evidence regarding advertising's impact on long-term branding. Prudent use of those new data sources in the age of Big Data remains critical (Broussard, 2016; Fulgoni, 2013; Terhanian et al., 2016).
Another example is the development of neuroscience-based methods to address marketing issues that appear to affect both theory and practice. The ARF has played a pioneering role in assessing these methods, which allow us to explore the emotional impact of advertising and marketing in new and better ways, free of cognitive processes that can bias responses and lead to wrong conclusions (Stipp and Woodard, 2011).
Theorists and practitioners long have hoped for such measures: Fifteen years ago, a review of research on advertising effects and how advertising works concluded that the role of emotions in advertising effectiveness probably had been understated, but it found that measures of noncognitive processes were not yet reliable for assessing such advertising effects (Vakratsas and Ambler, 1999). Applications of neuroscience-based methods to marketing are still relatively new, and scholars have called for more validation and transparency (Kennedy and Northover, 2016; Varan, Lang, Barwise, Weber, et al., 2015). As these measures have evolved, they have shown to provide valid new insights on the processing of advertising messages on different platforms (Stipp, 2015).4
CONCLUSIONS
The ARF's “How Advertising Works” analyses have demonstrated that three related but distinct factors have made an impact on the amount and direction of research on advertising during the last 80 years:
the emergence of new advertising platforms, which have to establish efficacy;
the constant change in consumer behaviors and attitudes, which demands a reexamination of past research findings;
method and data source innovation, which can provide better and more precise insights.
Will these factors also determine the future of advertising research?
Much has been written about today's accelerated pace of change, making predictions more difficult than ever. We see, however, that current research activity and plans for future research continue to be clearly related to those three factors—indicating that they will drive the future of advertising research in the following ways:
The efficacy and optimization of new advertising platforms and formats—from social media and search to native advertising, but also the “reinvention” of television—are major research issues. Future in-depth investigation is necessary, as it is more than likely that new advertising platforms will emerge and the meaning of “cross-media” will continue to change.
The rapidly changing media use of most consumer segments promises to be a continuous challenge for both measurement and research. Additionally, a whole range of new behaviors and attitudes toward advertising (such as ad blocking) requires study.
Methodology and data source innovation—the adoption of big data and analytics—has been a major focus during the last five years and most likely will continue to be subjects of research and debate. Undoubtedly, new methods to track advertising exposure, reaction, and impact will emerge and their validity will need to be assessed.
From this vantage point, all signs point to a constant strong and growing impact of technological innovation on all aspects of marketing and research. Technologies enabling programmatic buying are starting to have an impact. New technologies to better reach and target specific consumers are on the horizon, as are techniques to avoid advertisements or commit advertising fraud (Fulgoni, 2016).
As the “How Advertising Works” project moves forward, here's what won't change: the upholding of rigorous research quality standards while we continue to examine
which principles of advertising theory and practice are valid and relevant;
how advertisers, agencies, research providers, and also academics, should innovate to achieve success under changing conditions.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Horst Stipp is evp/research and innovation: global and ad effectiveness at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), where he has led the organization's neuroscience projects. Stipp's career in media research spans more than three decades, including his many years at NBCUniversal, where he oversaw strategic marketing and consumer research for the television networks as well as the new digital platforms. He also taught a seminar on media metrics at Columbia Business School. Stipp's research, published in English and German, has covered a wide range of topics, from advertising effectiveness and branding to the development of the media in the digital age.
Footnotes
↵1 “How Advertising Works™—The Industry's Most Groundbreaking and Intuitive Research in 30 Years.” (2016). Retrieved April 21, 2016, from Advertising Research Foundation website: http://thearf.org/how-advertising-works/.
↵2 “Move Over, Millennials, Here Comes Generation Z.” (2015, September 18). Retrieved April 22, 2016, from New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/fashion/move-over-millennials-here-comes-generation-z.html?_r=0)
↵3 “Santa Subs for Polar Bears in Coke's Holiday TV Ad.” (2014, November 25). Retrieved April 22, 2016, from AdAge.com : http://adage.com/article/see-the-spot/santa-subs-polar-bears-coke-s-holiday-tv-ad/295988/
↵4 “How Advertising Works™—The Industry's Most Groundbreaking and Intuitive Research in 30 Years.” The Advertising Research Foundation, 2016 (Ibid footnote 1).
- © Copyright 2016 The ARF. All rights reserved.
REFERENCES
Vol 56 Issue 3
