Creative Testing

Norstat specialises in high-quality data collection for creative testing. Our quantitative and qualitative research methods ensure reliable data gathering about any desired topic or target group, helping you understand consumer perceptions and attitudes towards your advertising and marketing concepts.

Why is creative testing important?

“The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Test your premise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

David Ogilvy – Confessions of an Advertising Man

Creative pre-testing is perfect for validating creative routes so your marketing efforts are as effective as possible for your target audience. Whether you are launching a new TV ad or testing a new strapline for your product, by evaluating different creative options before launching a campaign, you can:

• Lower risk: Pre-testing creatives with real consumers, rather than solely relying on your own or your agency’s opinions, reduces the chances of selecting sub-optimal campaigns.
• Enhance marketing effectiveness: Improve your return on investment by focusing on creatives that generate more business outcomes.
• Optimise design: Identify the most appealing design, elements and messaging to refine your creative approach.
• Inform marketing strategy: Gather valuable insights that can improve your overall marketing strategy.

Creative testing helps predict ad performance and optimise media ROI by providing insights into ad strengths, weaknesses, and overall impact on brand perception and purchase intent (Bain).

Optimising creative impact through data

Norstat offers multiple methodologies that can help you meet research objectives, including:

• Find out which creative aligns most closely with a brand’s positioning
• Understanding which creative is most engaging to a specific audience
• Understanding which creative stands out the most – appeal, likeability, talkability, purchase consideration
• Exploring which creative gives an advantage over other brands
• Find out the key messages and drivers that advertising must contain to maximise impact
• Gaining insights into why consumers prefer one idea compared to another

Key creative metrics to consider using in your survey include:

• Creative awareness: Unaided and aided recall of advertisements.
• Creative appeal: Ratings, likes, dislikes.
• Message comprehension: Main message understanding.
• Emotional response: Emotional impact of the creative.
• Purchase intent: Likelihood of purchase.
• Brand perceptions: Effect on attitudes towards the brand and product.

Using our online panel to test creatives

Online panels make it easy to target specific audiences, e.g. the type of person exposed to your creative. We provide high-quality data collection via our panel, which now has over 4 million respondents across 19 European countries. Respondents can be shown different designs, logos, images, audio and video. Using profiling and screener questions, we can survey people based on characteristics such as:

• Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, location.
• Media consumption habits: Usage and time spent on various media channels.
• Brand usage: Current users vs. non-users.
• Purchase intent: Likelihood to consider or purchase.
• Behavioural segmentation: Lifestyle, interests, purchasing, attitudes, values.
• Bespoke: Profiles that are specific to your product/industry/audience

Norstat Express for rapid testing of designs and logos

Norstat Express is our self-serve survey tool that provides immediate access to our consumer panels, perfect for rapid testing of creatives, advertisements and logos. It can provide answers within hours, making it easier to test ideas and get feedback early and often. Simply choose your target audience, create your survey with content to test, then launch – you can export the results into Excel, PowerPoint or Norstat Dashboards.

Creative testing and data quality

Data is crucial in creative testing, as accurate and representative data ensures feedback reflects true consumer behaviours. We apply screeners to match target demographics, consistent survey administration to avoid bias, and rigorous data validation processes to maintain integrity. Our clients back up our claims for panel quality, scoring us:

• 5.1/6 for panel quality
• 5.3/6 on the ability to deliver
• 5.3/6 on client satisfaction
• 49 net promoter score

 Read more about our extensive data quality practices here.

Recruiting focus groups for greater insight into creatives

A great creative should be eye-catching, stand out, and crucially, inspire people to talk about it. Focus groups, which are exploratory by nature, allow for this level of interaction, where praise and criticism can flow freely as the direction of the discussion evolves. Creative route, themes and messaging can be discussed in depth and the best communication of the campaign message found.

Discussion guide content could include:

• Background/purchase history
• What potential purchasers look for
• What are the key messages and drivers that the creatives must contain, and what shouldn’t they contain
• Prompt with the creative and evaluate each concept in detail; best communication of USP, most engaging, best appeal, gives visual competitive advantage over other brands, likes, dislikes, improvements, opportunities; rationale for choice
• Competitor creatives to be used as a benchmark

Norstat can assist with recruitment for your focus groups. To understand and compare the reactions of consumers living in different regions, we can recruit groups across a variety of locations.

Case study: Creative testing in the confectionery category

A media agency in the UK asked us to provide data collection for research on different advertising creatives, looking at creative routes, brand communications, motivations and purchase drivers in the confectionery sector. We delivered a sample of 500 who regularly buy confectionery to a 6-minute survey, with our full-service team scripting the survey. At the end of fieldwork, we supplied data tables for the client to analyse.

Data delivery tailored for creative testing

Like all aspects of our creative testing solution, deliverables are entirely tailored to your needs. Basic outputs include raw data or data tables, but clients can also opt for bespoke automated reporting solutions, such as Norstat Dashboards.