A Marketer’s Guide to Advertising Research

Advertising concept testing checks whether your ad’s story will land with the people it’s meant for before you spend the production budget. Great advertising can persuade, but persuasion alone rarely moves people to act. What does is a story that fires the imagination and stirs real emotion: joy, hope, excitement, even fear. Good testing tells you whether your territories, scripts and animatics carry that story clearly, whether the emotion is the one you intended, and what consumers will say about the ad to each other afterwards. It works best when research comes in early, before the creative brief, to identify the tension your brand resolves and the language consumers use for it. Testing finished ads matters too, but it’s the most expensive point to discover the story was wrong.

Why does storytelling matter so much in advertising?

Life happens in the stories we tell one another, and brands are no exception. Whether it’s a 30-second TVC, a billboard, a print ad or a social post (such as using GIFs to connect with hay fever sufferers), the ads that work give people something to feel and something to retell.

That’s why emotion sits at the centre of good advertising research. A rational message can be understood and forgotten in the same moment. A story creates a feeling, and feelings are what people remember, share and act on.

What should you ask before you brief the creative agency?

Before a single script is written, it pays to answer four questions:

1. What tension does my brand resolve? Have you used research to understand the key insight, and how you want to portray it?
2. What story will consumers tell each other about this ad, if any?
3. What will people share? What’s likely to be on their lips, or more likely in their social feeds?
4. Are we reaching the right people through the right media at the right time?

If you can’t answer these with evidence, the brief is resting on assumptions. Qualitative research at this stage is usually quick, and it’s far cheaper than reshooting.

What can advertising concept testing tell you?

Good ad development research does more than score a finished ad. It can help you:

• Understand your brand’s archetype. Archetypes are the basis of all great stories, and strong brands align with archetypal stories. Brand development research can define the core archetype alongside consumer insight, which makes for a sharper agency brief.
• Build a creative toolkit. Clarity on the words, images and need states that resonate gives your agency something useful to work with when developing the creative.
• Compare routes early. Testing territories and story ideas before production shows which direction has the most energy, so you can test the concept rather than just the execution.
• Refine before you finish. Animatics and rough cuts can be tested to fix comprehension and pacing while changes are still affordable.

How do you test the emotional impact of an ad?

People are notoriously poor at explaining why an ad moved them, so the method matters. We use a mix of approaches:

• Neuro testing to understand implicit brand connection, engagement and motivations that consumers can’t put into words
• Specialty group techniques, such as pyramid groups and conflict groups, within focus group research, to see how people understand the message and how they retell the brand’s story to each other
• Emotional quantitative techniques, which are growing in popularity because they get beyond the rational response and give the numbers a story when you’re measuring the connection, strength and cut-through of an ad

For longer or more personal categories, an online research community lets people live with stimulus over several days and react in their own words.

When should you bring a research agency into ad development?

Early, and often. The greatest lesson from years of advertising research is that great outcomes depend on great insight and great stimulus.

Bring research in early and it can:

• guide the creative agency on the tensions to solve and the formats to hero
• advise on the best formats, wording and imagery for testing
• produce specialty stimulus that shapes the creative earlier, especially consumer language
• show how to portray subtle need states such as “discernment”, “security” or “control”, which are often misread for the target consumer or occasion

Brought in only at the end, research can tell you an ad isn’t working, but by then the budget is spent and the options are narrow. A market research consultancy involved from the brief can help you get the best from both your research budget and your advertising budget.

Ruby Cha Cha’s take: Apply the retell test

The question we ask of every ad in development is simple: can a consumer retell it in one sentence, in their own words, and does that sentence sound like your brand?

If they can’t retell it, it isn’t a story yet. It’s a collection of nice images. If they retell it but the sentence belongs to a competitor, or to the category in general, your brand isn’t carrying the story. And if the retelling surprises you, it’s often the most valuable finding in the whole study, because that’s the version that will travel.

We build the retell test into every stage, from early territories to finished cuts, because it’s the closest thing in a research setting to what happens when people talk about your ad in real life.

 How does advertising research lead to better marketing decisions?

Testing the story before you commit gives marketing teams:

• Less waste: weak routes are dropped before production, not after airtime
• Sharper briefs: agencies work from real consumer language and tensions, not assumptions
• Clearer trade-offs: evidence to choose between routes when the internal team is split
• Measurable impact: a baseline to track whether the campaign shifted perceptions once it’s live, through brand health tracking

The insight also lasts beyond one campaign. The archetype, language and need states uncovered in ad research often feed into brand strategy workshops and future briefs.

Frequently asked questions

What is advertising concept testing?

Advertising concept testing is research that checks whether an ad idea communicates clearly, creates the intended emotion and fits the brand before it’s produced. It can test territories, scripts, storyboards and animatics. It’s most valuable early, while there’s still room to change direction.

When should you bring a research agency into ad development?

As early as possible, ideally before the creative brief. Early research identifies the consumer tension to solve and the language to use, and helps design good stimulus. Bringing research in only to test finished ads leaves little room to act on the results.

How do you test the emotional impact of an ad?

Combine methods, because people struggle to explain their emotional reactions. Neuro testing captures implicit responses, specialty focus groups show how people interpret and retell the story, and emotional quantitative measures size the connection and cut-through across a larger sample.

Ruby Cha Cha is a Sydney-based market research agency that helps brands get the story right before the cameras roll. If you’ve got a campaign in development, our consumer insights consultants can help you test the ideas that matter. Talk to us about bringing research in early.