TELLING GOOD FROM B-ADS
Plenty of people believe there are a lot of bad ads on television, but proving it is another matter.
A widespread system for rating and comparing all TV spots has proven elusive for Madison Avenue.
Despite legions of researchers and innumerable awards to honor creative excellence, ad- vertisers and their agencies struggle to delineate “good” ads from “bad” ones.
Enter the Advertising Rating Co., a Glendale, Calif., start-up that has developed a system that purports to measure the creative effectiveness of all TV commercials.
The company asks a panel of 1,000 consumers to rate ads based on their persuasiveness and “watchability” – whether a spot holds their interest and attention without trying their patience.
A computer then crunches those responses and comes up with an “ACE” score, short for advertising creative effectiveness, between 0 and 950 for each spot. The “effectiveness threshold” is around 300, so an ad that hovers around that mark is, well, mediocre.
According to the company’s first batch of scores, consumers rated six out of 10 TV commercials ineffective. The rate is worse for some of the top-spending categories, with 67 percent of auto ads and 62 percent of retail spots falling short of the mark.
No doubt the results will be greeted with some skepticism, especially in a business where seemingly silly and annoying ads can still generate buzz.
Still, Steve Goldman, the Advertising Rating Co.’s chief executive, argues this is the first time a company is measuring TV ads and putting them on a scale for all to see.
Typically, advertisers commission research on ad effectiveness to judge a specific campaign and almost always keep the results under wraps for competitive reasons.
“Most advertisers do custom research and test just their ads,” said Goldman, a former adman at agencies such as BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day. “For the first time as an advertiser, you can look at scores for other competitors.”
In the latest survey, the company asked consumers to rate 140 current ads.
The top ad, which got an ACE score of 527, was a humorous Bud Light spot that shows what happens when two men attempt to drink beer at an opera. The lowest score of 95 went to a HeadOn Pain Reliever ad that has been the subject of much blog derision.