It's also not a good representation of good marketing on the web. Everything can be tested, often without a lot of extra effort or any additional expenditure. Amazon, Facebook and Google all offer A/B split testing and both Facebook and Google have multivariate testing as part of their advertising platforms. There are also a number of companies that offer tools for testing digital ads. Every digital marketing activity offers an opportunity for testing. Too few marketers take full advantage of that.
Google's Unskippable Labs created and tested 33 ads for a fake brand of pizza and cheesecake. They were interested in testing the impact of sensory cues and testing conventional ad wisdom like "you cannot have someone chewing and looking directly at the camera." Here's a link to the 15 that are still on YouTube. Its interesting to look at the variations shown on the YouTube page. Some of the 33 ad variations were small--sound vs. no sound, for example, but the total effort produced interesting and useful findings.
- Immersive, multi-sensory experiences have more impact than single sensory ones
- Separate visual input from text
- Give explicit instruction to imagine
- Food ads with edge-to-edge (close-up) shots perform better
- Portray food experience in different ways
- Younger people reacted better to personal point-of-view ads than did older people.
Dr. Ryan Elder of Brigham Young University collaborated with Google on this project. His research interests center on sensory experiences and visual cues. Dr. Elder says, "This collaboration with Google created a unique environment where creative development in advertising could be informed by academic theory, tested in the real world, and immediately disseminated to companies to use."
However you use them, this is the type of large-scale ad experiment that should provide students a lot of food for thought
No comments:
Post a Comment