ARF 2009 Re:think Conference Overview

The Advertising Research Foundation"s annual three-day conference in late March attracted the usual mix of researchers, advertisers, and agencies. If ever there was a year that justified a gathering of research and marketing leaders to re-think the future direction and methodologies of advertising research, this was certainly the year " yet attendance was below last year"s levels, another reflection of these challenging times.

The first day focused on the urgent need for change. A panel of marketers (MTV Networks, Unilever, Microsoft, and Johnson & Johnson) delivered the message that they are looking for thought leadership from their advertising research heads, as opposed to their traditional role of "data waiters and waitresses". Furthermore, these marketers underscored the need for research to pick up the pace and match the speed of business that is their daily reality. They concluded by defining the key role of research as "identifying business opportunities for their companies".

A panel of research industry leaders representing The Nielsen Company, The Kantar Group, Ipsos, and Information Resources Inc. (IRI) responded to the advertiser challenge by discussing how research will change within the next five years. This group agreed with the marketer perspective on the need for research to provide strategic input into company plans, and to accelerate their process to match today"s pace of business. The panel"s third directive centered on the way researchers think about consumers. In order to get at consumers" conscious and unconscious product and brand selection processes, they urged their fellow researchers to study consumers as people, where the observation of emotions and the narrative of life (as opposed to the standard attitudinal and usage measures) would more likely lead to richer holistic insights.

What else can we expect from the researchers of tomorrow? We will see a move towards more scientific methodologies such as neuroscience. Today"s forays into neuroscience-based research are demonstrating its ability to provide extremely timely and accurate data " an excellent compliment to or even potentially replacement for the currently prevalent survey-based and observational methodologies. Innerscope Research stated that over 75% of brain processing is unconscious, and therefore difficult to study without neuroscience. Neuroscience methodology includes a network of sensors (usually placed in a vest worn by research subjects) to measure skin reaction, heartbeat, breathing, and motion and an eye-tracking device. Some marketers have already been accessing Innerscope services to evaluate creative executions, and recently, TIVO Inc. collaborated with this research company to explore the relationship between viewer engagement with an ad and the likelihood of fast-forwarding. Not surprisingly, the results clearly indicated that emotionally engaging ads were less likely to be fast-forwarded.

Nine Network (Australia) shared their use of neuroscience to better understand the relationship between program and advertising engagement levels. They discovered that these engagement metrics can tell a very different story from that of standard industry program ratings. As a result, Nine Network is working towards the eventual inclusion of these new engagement metrics within the commercial airtime selling process as an additional factor to consider beyond standard ratings and audience data.

Microsoft has also experimented with neuroscience to understand the difference in viewer impact between ads aired on television and online video ads. Their Research Manager presented an initiative where television ads (all :30s in standard commercial clusters) and online video ads (all :30s in pre-roll positions) were studied. They learned that online ads appeal to the part of the brain that processes auditory signals; whereas television ads activate the part of the brain that deals with visual and cognitive processing. Additionally, online video seem to generate a higher range of emotional reactions " this is because viewers tend to be more engaged when they are online as they are typically there for a purpose. Of note, the higher emotional response levels of online video were inconsistent " that is, inconsistently positive and negative. By contrast, television ads, while generating lower emotional reactions (because viewers were usually in a relaxed frame of mind), tended to deliver more consistently positive responses. The Microsoft study concluded that television ads are generally more effective than online video. Of note, this study and the preceding examples were intended to be experiments of neuroscience methodology as opposed to meaningful studies of the viewing public. In most cases, sample sizes were too small to be considered credible or representative.

Researchers of the future will be part of their company"s strategic planning process, they will find ways to accelerate the pace of research, they will become anthropologists, and they will embrace science as a powerful research tool. What a wonderful time to be a researcher!