Stop wasting your money on creative testing

Legendary ad man David Ogilvy summed it up best (as often he did).  “Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving”.  As insightful as this is, he stopped short on telling how to test your advertising.  We have some ideas.

Focus groups are not the only way to test creative… and if you’re open to other ideas… we can show how to do it better. Focus groups are great for ideation, issue identification, generating creative gems, understanding new markets, and a myriad of other uses.  But there are other, effective ways to test creative that we believe are tried and true.

Our proven approach: one-on-one interviews. It’s not revolutionary, but it works. One-on-one interviews are more effective than focus groups for creative testing for several reasons. 

• These messages are often “personal” and speak to people’s personal beliefs and attitudes.  Therefore, testing them one-on-one with people helps to better understand what they believe, not what they believe while in a group setting. 

   

• If you hear the same thing 10 or 20 or 30 times over with 10 or 20 or 30 interviews it is more powerful (and a better finding) than having one person say something and having 9, 19 or 29 other people agree with them (group think). 

   

• In a one-on-one interview respondents can’t avoid not giving an opinion about what we show them (where in a focus group they can hide, not speak out or simply agree with someone else). 

   

• It is a safe environment to completely agree or disagree with the subject matter, as people are less concerned about being “socially accepted” in a group environment—in short, they are more themselves.  

   

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly you get a much better read on body language in a one-on-one setting (which is an enormously important consideration). You can look the respondent in the eye, you can see what they think, you can see them smile, laugh, consider or reject easily.