How to measure advertising's plausibility

This article examines what brands must understand about how well advertising claims coexist with consumers’ underlying associations in order to produce effective creative that is believable and relevant.

When testing their creative executions, brands have historically relied upon high-attention metrics, including how likeable, entertaining, relevant and believable the communication is. While easily captured and useful for cross-category comparisons, empirical research has long shown these metrics cannot adequately measure advertising efficacy and predict business outcomes. These limitations are borne of the psychometric and statistical constraints of using entirely self-stated ratings, which impede the development of marketing strategy, and ultimately fail to provide a validated hierarchy of priorities for brands. Additionally, these high-attention metrics provide minimal diagnostic insight into why creative performs the way it does, thereby inhibiting their utility...

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