Ipsos-ASI

Pre-testing philosophy
At Ipsos-ASI, our aim is to support creative thinking whilst giving our clients the service and insights they need.

We explore the potential in-market effects, whatever the medium or media mix, and whatever its stage of development, whilst providing fast, cost-effective local and global solutions.

In addition we add lots of diagnostics, as we are keen to offer pre-learning as well as pretesting.

The essence of our approach is as follows.

• For advertising to be effective it has to trigger an emotional or rational response, and it can achieve that response only if it cuts through the clutter, is noticed and is associated with the brand.
• We evaluate the potential effects by measuring the difference in response between one set of respondents exposed to the advertising with a second set of respondents not exposed. By measuring the differences between the two samples we measure the subconscious as well as the conscious responses. We do not rely on respondents telling us how they think they will respond.
• We have a variety of response measures covering brand interest, brand equity and brand imagery. Our approach is to understand the complete picture – we do not focus on any one single number. And we dig long and hard into the data to help our clients fully understand the reasons for the ad’s performance on all our measures.
• When measuring TV recall we allow for forgetting and low involvement. Hence our traditional offline methodology measures branded recall one day after the ad is seen in a real in-home context, and our online methodology measures it by modelling consumer attitudes towards the advertising (using a model created from our offline learnings).
• We are flexible, as we do not believe ‘one size fits all’. We have standard measures that allow us to compare tests over time and across markets. But we know that every creative execution is different, every brand is different and every market is different, so we adjust wording when appropriate, and add tailor-made statements or questions to address specific issues.

• our focus on the complete brand response
• our recall measures, which allow for both forgetting and low involvement
• the Copy Effect Index, a modelled measure data, provides a unique assessment of the ad’s ability to affect sales
• drivers analysis – we have developed a unique tailor-made piece of software that helps us sort the open-ended responses and allows us to determine which elements of the execution or message are driving the changing disposition towards the brand
• Emoti*scape module – by using visuals as well as text to explore the emotional responses, we are able to collect a richer picture of the advertising response and its potential effect on the brand
• Emoti*trace (TV and cinema only) and Hotspots (print and outdoor only) – these tools help us understand which parts of the ad are driving the positive emotional response.