Almost always a theory-of-effect problem: the message is being tested for comprehension and agreement, while the mechanism it needs to work through is memory or recognition. Decide how the advertising is supposed to work before testing whether it does.
10 tools across 2 of the 9 questions
Six mutually incompatible theories of how advertising produces its effect, set out together because the industry uses all six while claiming only one.
Breaks when It will not tell you what to do. Useful at the start of a brief, useless at the end of one.
Say somethingThe repeated finding that the advertisement itself accounts for the largest single share of the sales effect — larger than targeting, reach, or where it ran.
Breaks when Two limits. The decompositions are run on campaigns that were already bought and distributed competently, so the finding says creative dominates among ads people actually saw — it does not say good creative rescues a campaign with no reach. And “creative quality” in these studies is largely an outcome-defined residual: what is left after the measurable variables are accounted for. Without a pre-test that predicts it, the claim edges toward circularity. Add that the major decompositions come from measurement vendors with a commercial interest in the conclusion, and this stays a Frame rather than a Law.
Say somethingNon-name brand elements — colours, characters, sounds, shapes — that trigger the brand in memory, scored on fame and uniqueness.
Breaks when A new brand has no assets to score — investment first, measurement much later. And changing an asset resets everything accumulated in it.
Say somethingSix properties — simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story — shared by ideas that survive being retold.
Breaks when An evaluation tool posing as a generation tool. Chase all six at once and you achieve none.
Say somethingThe model that buyers pass in sequence through attention, interest, desire and action, with the population narrowing at each step.
Breaks when It breaks as a description of behaviour, which is the thing it claims to be. No empirical work has established that buyers move through these stages in sequence; measurement finds interrupted, non-linear, re-entered paths, and finds that most category buyers are in no stage at all at any given time. Treating it as real produces the characteristic errors: chasing “interest” as if it converts downward on a schedule, and building stage-gated budgets for a population that does not queue.
Say somethingMeasuring the seconds a person actually looks at an advertisement, instead of the opportunities-to-see that a media buy nominally delivers.
Breaks when It breaks on how the number is made. Attention is measured by eye-tracking on comparatively small opt-in panels, then modelled across platforms whose formats, screen sizes and viewing contexts differ enormously — so the cross-platform comparison, which is the use everyone wants, is the least supported part. Thresholds for what counts as attention are vendor-defined and not standardised, and the strongest evidence links attention to short-term sales measures rather than to long-term brand effects. Treated as currency it becomes a target, and the format that maximises measured seconds is not automatically the format that sells.
Reach peopleA five-step ladder describing how much a prospect already knows — unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most aware — used to decide where a message has to start.
Breaks when There is no measurement attached to it. Nothing tells you which stage a visitor occupies, so the stage is assigned afterwards from what the copy did — a page that failed gets re-diagnosed as aimed at the wrong stage, and the ladder is never wrong. It also assumes one reader per page, and paid traffic delivers all five stages to the same URL at once.
Say somethingA two-route account of persuasion: when a person is able and motivated to think about a message they process its arguments; when they are not, they respond to the cues around it instead.
Breaks when Elaboration is not observable in advance. In the field the route gets inferred from what worked, which makes the model unfalsifiable there: a rational ad that failed is relabelled a low-elaboration situation and the model is preserved. It also presumes a decision worth thinking about, and most category purchases are low-attention repeats where neither route is engaged and availability decides the outcome.
Say somethingThe model that advertising moves a buyer up an ordered set of mental steps — awareness, knowledge, liking, preference, conviction, purchase — each one a prerequisite for the next.
Breaks when The ordering has been examined and not found. Hierarchy models neither describe the effects of advertising accurately nor conceptualise how advertising works as a market force, and forty years of reviews have failed to establish the sequence they assert. Treating the steps as prerequisites produces the standard error: money spent lifting awareness on the assumption that preference and purchase follow it on a schedule, and a tracker that reports movement at the top of the ladder as progress toward the bottom.
Say somethingA five-level scale of how many times a market has already heard a claim, used to decide whether to lead with the promise, a bigger promise, a mechanism, a better mechanism, or identification with the reader.
Breaks when The level is asserted, never measured, and it is asserted about a whole market when sophistication is a property of an individual buyer's exposure history. Someone entering a level-five category for the first time has heard none of the claims. The scale also runs one way only: it says markets get more jaded and never less, which is contradicted by the constant inflow of new category buyers that keeps the naive level populated indefinitely.
Say something