Despite having earned my living in market research for a number of years I am very doubtful about the value of ‘ad testing’. Whilst market research may be of some value in testing advertising messages, overall I would be reluctant to recommend traditional ‘ad testing’ to a client. Having said that the power of contemporary […]

Despite having earned my living in market research for a number of years I am very doubtful about the value of ‘ad testing’. Whilst market research may be of some value in testing advertising messages, overall I would be reluctant to recommend traditional ‘ad testing’ to a client. Having said that the power of contemporary ‘ad testing’ is another matter altogether. Testing online advertising has created enormous opportunities for reducing costs by targeting investment on media and content that generates the best results, particularly in terms of generation ‘click throughs’. The potential for media and content testing with online advertising is being realised more and more, but still not to the level that it might be. It is so easy and so inexpensive to run a variety of advertisements in a variety of media and directly measure the impact before determining what works best and them fine tuning the best of them.…