Recession may be dampening ad spend, but it didn't prevent WARC from attracting the highest number of delegates they've ever had to this annual snapshot of all that's latest and best in advertising research.

Not to be confused with WARC's annual conference on Measuring Advertising Performance (MAP), which focuses more narrowly on tracking (and packs in even larger numbers), the agenda today was rather wider and able to address, for example, the macro trend of audience participation via recommendation and blogs. 

Over 100 of us packed into a low-ceilinged room in the St James Sofitel to hear what 18 speakers had to say on the topic. For some reason the music during the breaks was taken from the Mama Mia soundtrack so you'll indulge me if I attempt to use Abba song titles to break up a marathon of ideas and discussion.

Name of the Game

Hall and Partners' Helen Nuki, the conference chair, set the scene with quotes from Rupert Murdoch, Faris Yakob of Naked and Mark Earls on the big picture of people power, participation and the herd effect.

The keynote from Jonathan Carson, founder of Buzz Metrics and now President of Nielsen Online, provided a wall of data showing the growth of consumer generated content and word of mouth.  Much of this seemed to be based on a growing belief that consumers believe they are more influenced by word of mouth than advertising - whether or not this is true. But it also points to the changing role of advertising, which is to start conversations rather than attempt to end them.  A promising start.

Slipping through my Fingers

The next session about how advertising works featured 3 speakers with quick-fire presentations. Les Binet summarised the learnings of 26 years of IPA effectiveness:

• Emotional advertising works better than rational advertising
• Campaigns attempting to grow penetration and maintain brand loyalty do better than campaigns trying to achieve a more single-minded objective
• At best, advertising changes pricing sensitivities allowing advertisers to drive profits up
• But in spite of everything, most advertisers continue to favour rational propositions, prioritising brand retention and objectives other than pricing sensitivity.

It begs the question: Why is marketing culture so out of synch with best practice? But we rushed on.

The next two speakers, Arie K den Boon and Peter Stefou of GfK, talked through the tradeoffs between real-time and time-series tracking. It served to remind us why advertising tracking is so difficult - either overwhelming us with short term noise or giving us perspective without the detail to do something about it.

Take a Chance on Me

There was a whole session devoted to the targeting of emotions. Jakob de Lemos' approach was simple - he had a widget for measuring pre-attention at an unconscious level, arguing that "the eyes are the part of your brain that hangs out of your head". So, using standard eye-tracking cameras, he can monitor up to 70% of your emotions.

David Bonney took a more sceptical line: there are more emotions than current schemas can easily pin down. He proposed using hypnotism supported by Thematic Aperception Tests to measure favourability. Having opened the gate so wide, the question became whether people would care enough about advertising to generate scores.

A surprise addition from Chuck Young of Ameritest finished the session. His company tests emotional responses to most of the top TV advertisers in the US, so there is a large data set for benchmarking.  He claimed that it was possible to build a model using emotional response which explained the effects of 62% of advertising spend. He also claimed he could even account for 30% of the advertised spend using scores of the creative content of the competitors' ads!   He also outlined a 4-way typology of how ads worked in managing positive and negative responses. Following this whirlwind of presentations, there was no time for the audience to challenge some audacious claims.

Does Your Mother Know?

There was no room for blue-sky thinking in the pre-lunch session on engagement, since each of the speakers were asked to explain their methodology for testing engagement - so there was a lot of detail in a little time.

First up was Mark Brown (Weapon7) and Doug Edmonds (2cv) talking about how to measure engagement, primarily through getting people to participate. There were no surprises here since Mark's specialism is interactive TV - getting you to push the red button - but they were able to show how engagement drove brand favourability.

Vicky Gwilliam of the Guardian followed with an elaborate scheme for tracking engagement with the medium as well as engagement with the advertising.  Her challenge had been to construct a methodology which worked well for the press when so much of the focus of engagement had been on TV.

Will Goodhand concluded the session by introducing Brainjuicer's methodology for measuring engagement using facial expressions both observed from participants (via webcams) and by getting respondents to score their own emotional response using schematics of the human face. It's ingenious when you consider that this allows them to measure engagement instantly, anywhere in the world and across language and cultural barriers.

Under Attack

The afternoon started with a gladiatorial contest on the topic of pre-testing between Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown and Dan O'Donoghue of Publicis. Hollis led with a spirited defence of pre-testing - there are 10 benefits but I only have time to tell you five.  More memorable was the plea to stop beating up his Link test couriers in corridors and reception areas. Apparently they're getting wearying of feeling the hate.

With that, we expected Dan to charge across the ring with war stories about link-test disasters, but it was not to be.  Choosing to take a pecha-kucha, 20-second-per-slide approach, Dan made the very simple point that link tests were far too televisual to be useful in a commercial environment where communications ideas needed to work across lots of channels.

The great clash never materialised.  All a bit different from when I introduced myself to Dan many years ago as the planning director of an integrated agency. "Integrated?" he snorted. "No such thing." How the times have changed.

Knowing Me Knowing You

The rest of the afternoon was given over to a series of weighty topics. Viacom's Agostino Di Falco ticked the box for neuroscience by reporting on a research study comparing MRI scans of people watching commercials with those watching programmes. As ever with neuroscience, the slides are full of charts of electrical pulses. But there is also the helpful addition of labels such as absorption and meaning, which the neuroscientists have used to show the patterns emanating from various parts of the brain.

The overall conclusion was that people's brains were more engaged with advertising than the programmes. An alternative explanation might have been that in the first 30 seconds of a programme, your brain is more engaged than over a 30 minute period.

More interesting was the contention that ads which were congruent with the programmes got 24% better 'activation' than those which weren't. Again, this brings out the contrarian in me. Was this because the viewer spotted the congruence between ads and programmes and enjoyed the connection? Or was it because the distinction between advertising and editorial had been so eroded that the ad was enlarged by the editorial content around it - surely against the spirit, if not the letter, of the code.

SOS

Next up was Claire Spencer of i to i research, Keith Glasspoole of Ipsos and Jon Harper of Synovate who between them had plenty of case studies demonstrating the ability to track and measure multi-channel campaigns and to look at the effects of combining different media - but new news was harder to come by. 

Scott Thomson, the 18th speaker of the day, provided a useful curtain closer for the event by pushing back the parameters of what campaign tracking research is supposed to do.

He distinguished between the measurement of different assets: rented assets vis-à-vis advertising, earned assets (for example, word of mouth), and owned assets such as in-store facings and an installed product base.

Take Nokia: how many millions of Nokia phones are being used and seen to be used daily? When did this last figure in a tracking proposal? Clients can win stand-out by concentrating their promotional spend in earned or owned assets. They don't have to continue to expend vast amounts to maintain share in rented spaces, if they were to concentrate their spend to exploit the advantages they already enjoy with their distribution and customer bases.

It was a good way to end the day.

Thank You for the Music

So where have we got to?  There is a sea change in progress in terms of customer participation.  But it is evident that far too many clients are plugging on with the same types of budget and the same type of measurement tools.

The increases in computational power are allowing us to measure advertised effects ever more minutely. The siren calls suggesting it is time we measure something else are getting louder. But they have not yet changed the status quo.

Check back here soon after the event for John Griffiths' first-hand account of the day or find out more now about Advertising Research 2008.