The Feldwick Factor: Is creative and planner intuition a better predictor of effectiveness than pre-testing?

Good advertising decisions arguably have less to do with the 'intuition' of any individual, and much more to do with the quality of the conversation that is allowed to take place between those who share responsibility for the outcome.

The Feldwick Factor: Is creative and planner intuition a better predictor of effectiveness than pre-testing?

Paul Feldwick

Do we know exactly how predictive any pre-testing method is? There's little information in the public domain that lets us make an objective estimate of their success rates, or what levels of false negatives or false positives they generate.

But I find reasons to believe that even the best of them fall short of the high predictive standards that they implicitly lead us to expect. The dominant methods are based on models of message transmission and conscious attention that have been seriously challenged,...

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