Back to the Future: Looking back at Rosser Reeves

This article looks back at the legacy of the famous American advertising executive Rosser Reeves.

Back to the Future: Looking back at Rosser Reeves

Malcolm White

Malcolm White looks back ... at Rosser Reeves' legacy, not just his fallacy.

Rosser Reeves is infamous for proposing, more than half a century ago, that a good way of proving the effect of advertising was to compare the brand scores of ad recognisers with the brand scores of non-recognisers. He claimed that a correlation between high recognition and strong brand scores should be regarded as causal - when of course it shouldn't: people who already know and like a brand will tend to notice the same brand's advertising....

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