Peter Daboll is CEO of Ace Metrix™

Peter Daboll is CEO of Ace Metrix™, a company that measures the creative effectiveness of in-market TV advertising. Daboll started his career in TV and creative testing at IRI before spending over a decade in the digital world, most recently as CEO of Bunchball and Chief Insights Officer at Yahoo!.

What was the thinking behind Ace Metrix’s new benchmarking service for television advertising creative?

We wanted to leverage what we’d learned in the digital world, which was so much about quick response and looking at how ads worked behaviorally. In TV, it seemed to take an awful long time to understand whether an ad was working or not. We also felt that if you really look at how ads are tested today on television, the creative testing process is kind of a fake environment. You don’t watch one ad at a time; you watch dozens of ads every night, and we felt that evaluating the creative of just one ad was looking at it in a vacuum. The most effective part of how creative resonates is how well it’s doing relative to everything else a consumer or a viewer is seeing.

How does the scoring system work, and what makes Ace Metrix insight relevant and valuable to chief marketing executives?
 
Creative is always the x-factor in any campaign. Many CMOs have told me it’s the largest part of their budget but also the least measured and with the highest risk. So we essentially score the creative in a number of key dimensions that are linked with actual in-market behaviors, things like reliability, information, relevance, desire and attention. Those core attributes are then combined with a watchability score to compute what we call the “A score.” And the A score is computed the same way for every ad, so you can compare ads across verticals with a level playing field, the same questions, the same general population sample.

So it’s a comparable way to see how your ads are doing. We’re finding CMOs use our system a number of ways, but first to pre-test their ads and see how they’re going to do before they actually go live. Once live, they use it to see how their ads do against all demographic groups and compare with competitive ads. What are competitors doing? Are they higher than me?  Are they performing better? Are they performing worse and do we need to respond?

The fact our ads are scored within a 24-hour window and our system is accessible by iPhone and iPad give almost immediate response to the creative environment CMOs live and die in, and that speed and competitive context is changing the game.

How are marketers using this to increase the impact and effectiveness of their media spend?

Our clients link our scores to downstream ROI measures, so they know the key driving scores for their particular categories and brand – be it attention, relevance – that work against their target demos they know have positive ROI. Second, we’re all about media schedule, so we can tell precisely where in and where out the ads should be rotated, which ads to take out of the rotation and which ads to replace them with. Getting to see every ad your consumers are responding to yields all kinds of creative and execution options for marketers that they couldn’t see before.

Have you identified any common variables through the ad scoring that have implications for different types of creative strategies and executions?

We have this incredible horizontal view across all ads, so when we decided to look at celebrities, for example, we could look at every single celebrity endorsement ad that ran on national TV last year. And with a couple of exceptions, celebrity ads do worse, or below norm, in every category they run in. Celebrities are polarizing, and consumers either love them or hate them, besides those exceptions where the celebrity was woven into the storyline.

We’ve also seen that animals and pets, especially in some of the Super Bowl spots, have always done well. We see a lot of strong relationships with different soundtracks, and that music is a key element in creative emotive power. And now we’re seeing cause-related advertising as the new phenomenon of really high impact advertising.

We saw it with Dawn last year during the oil spill, when they ran what was actually an old spot about Dawn dishwashing detergent being used to clean birds contaminated with oil. That ad really had a high score. We saw another one just recently with Liberty Mutual scoring well with a creative spot about not texting and driving. So relevance can be one of the key things we look at in what drives successful advertising.

Often you’ll see an ad that was very funny or likeable, but it doesn’t resonate with people. Or you’ll see a high likeability score, but it doesn’t have information or relevance and doesn’t score well. So it’s really about having that balance between a watchable, engaging ad with key dimensions of information and relevance that make it stand out.

How is your ability to measure ad effectiveness changing the relationship between brands and their advertising agencies?

The agencies were a little reluctant at first. People don’t like to be evaluated, but we’ve found that the more agencies worked with us, the more they liked us. First of all, there’s an objective benchmark on how well their creative is doing. If they’re moving from a lower number and suddenly delivering a higher number, then there’s empirical proof that the creative is better, that it’s working better, and it’s not just somebody’s judgment or a new brand team that didn’t like the new direction. It’s empirical and fact-based.

Second, once these ads start getting benchmarked and people start delivering against those benchmarks, everyone wins. The agency wins because they know they’re delivering top notch creative, and the brand wins because they’re resonating with consumers. We’ve had cases where the brand actually holds their agency accountable for a specific Ace score contractually. Other times, they just look at it together to evaluate the ads with a new diagnostic tool, but one that allows them to talk about data in the creative process, which is really kind of a neat thing.

Nine Common Obstacles That Derail Growth

By Lisa Nirell

As you approach the end of the first quarter of 2011, your growth plan and marketing activities are well underway. How will you keep them fresh and relevant?

Launching and implementing your growth plan entails risks. Plans often expose underlying conflicts within the organization. It may disrupt the status quo, the ways decisions are made, and strain the most established relationships among key players. How can you prevent current operating norms and Belief Systems (B.S.) from dictating, derailing or delaying your growth plan?

The first step is to understand the main causes of plan derailment. Here are the most 9 common ones that I have observed over the past two decades:

1. Lack of communication – The plan doesn't get communicated to employees or allies who keep on working in the dark.
2. Mired in the day-to-day – Managers consumed by daily operating problems lose sight of long-term goals. Today's technical outage, employee resignation, or client emergency will happen. The question is: How well are you structured to delegate some of these emergencies to others who can handle them?
3. Out of the ordinary – The plan is treated as something separate and removed from the management process.
4. People perceive vision, mission and value statements as fluff. How did that limiting belief become part of your company culture?
5. The plan is reviewed too infrequently to stay relevant. If you are relying on one annual retreat to review your plan, you might as well not have one. It has already become obsolete.
6. Conducting business as usual after a live planning meeting – How often have you seen teams leave a planning session and quietly comment about "getting back to normal again?"
7. Failing to make the tough choices – A solid, well thought out plan will reveal deficiencies in your team, your marketing plan, your funding or your capacity. Are you ready to fill those gaps and relieve people who are a poor fit in the new organization? Or do you tend to hope they will leave on their own accord? Will you need to meet with your banker and request a higher line of credit? These are challenges you must confront, not ignore.
8. Lacking a scoreboard – Are you measuring what's easy or what is important?
9. Neglecting to benchmark your company against the competition – Remember that your biggest competitors may include Inertia, Inc. and Not Invented Here.

You can overcome these common planning mishaps. For best results, regularly share the strategic plan with other stakeholders like investors, customers, alliance partners, etc. An "open book" approach will likely generate more helpful ideas and suggestions about the future of your business.

This post originally appeared on Fast Company.com.

Lisa Nirell is the Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth®. She helps companies grow customer mind share and market share. Since 1983, Lisa has worked with Trend Micro, Zappos, BMC Software, Microsoft, IBM, and hundreds of entrepreneurs in nine countries. Lisa is also an award-winning expert speaker, business columnist and the author of "EnergizeGrowth® NOW: The Marketing Guide to a Wealthy Company."