Pharmaceutical Executive Europe - April 2008 - (Page 35) Pharmaceutical Executive Europe April 2008 Last Word 35 associate the ad with a brand, the ad hasn’t achieved what it set out to do. All metrics are not equal and brand stand-out is always the most important. I’m sure we can all recall ‘great’ ads that we talk about to our friends, but can’t remember what was being advertised? For the brand funding the ad, these are not actually such great ads! So research shows that creativity is key but also needs handled with care so the creativity does not distract you from remembering what was being advertised or what it was supposed to be telling you about the brand. Saying something new and relevant about the brand New news, highly relevant to the target audience, is the most motivating short-term communication for ad content. But it needs to be credible and, ideally, differentiating too. It’s likely to lead to a good uplift in prescriptions for new brands and also for brands with genuinely new information. For other brands, the challenge may be to find a new way of presenting the same information so it’s seen as fresh. However, not all brands have something new to say all of the time. Often for established brands there is little new information so expectations of the advertising have to be tempered by this. What it means for these ads is they have to work even harder on the ‘stopping power’ since they don’t have the benefit of new news to drive sales. The most sales effective ads of all are likely to be those that have both stopping power and say something new, relevant and motivating. While some may still claim this is all mumbo jumbo and advertising cannot be ‘measured’ in this way, recent experiments in neuroscience support this approach. In a test we carried out with a US company, Brainwave Science, we compared the results of our advertising pre-test research to those using Brainwave’s patented brainwave measurement (EEG) technique. The results were compelling. The scenes in the test ad that generated the strongest brain response were the same scenes that quantitative research identified as the most emotionally powerful. This suggests that Brainwave Science’s approach is meaningful, but equally it that the introspective questions and related surveybased approaches employed in our quantitative research are measuring genuine responses and tapping into what’s going on ‘in consumers’ heads. The good news is that four out of the six were above average in being memorable for the brand. In fact the Versatis ‘Back pain’ and Reductil ‘Elvis’ ads scored as well as almost any ads over the last five years. Both ads generated interest from GPs, with the Versatis ad being ‘intriguing’ and ‘informative,’ while the Reductil ad scored most highly as ‘original.’ The Xenical campaign has probably received more awards than any campaign in recent years. And results from the study showed the Xenical ‘Cheese’ ad is also likely to be sales effective — our research showed that the ad tells GPs something relevant and associates this message strongly to Xenical — not least because of a consistent campaign theme that is recognised. Consistency is a feature of many of the very best campaigns. The Detrusitol ‘Toilet Head’ ad is both ‘original’ but also ‘irritating’ for a significant minority — both likely to aid stopping power but not always in a positive way for everyone. The Canestan ‘Boxer shorts’ ad disappoints GPs. Their reaction to it is typified by words such as ‘ordinary’ and ‘unattractive’ and ‘it doesn’t say anything new.’ Used on its own, this advert is unlikely to maximise its ROI. But it could work better when used as part of the wider campaign. Interestingly, the Duac ‘Silly’ ad scores well, not because it is a particularly engaging creative with GPs but because it is seen to say something new and relevant to them — and this is likely to be the sales driver for the ad. It is reassuring to clients then that, based on these ads taken in isolation, award-winning ads are likely to be more sales effective than your average healthcare ad. Creativity is a key component of most award judging and a key factor in getting ads noticed. But it’s clear there are more ways than one of being successful; being seen as creative is certainly no guarantee of success. Pharmaceutical marketers need to embrace creativity and also need to embrace the learnings about advertising that improve the brand’s chance of success. And, with increasing need to justify marketing budgets, being able to predict advertising effectiveness will help inform budget allocation and ad copy choices. We are continuing to look at brainwave activity on exposure to advertising copy. What we learn from this promises to further challenge the approach to advertising evaluation and pre-testing in the next 10 years. We may not see awards judges and GPs with electrodes plugged into their brains yet — but watch this space! ■ Are awards aligned with success? To answer this question, we recently conducted a study of six award winning ads — for Xenical (Roche), Duac (Stiefel Laboratories), Versatis (Grürenthal GmbH), Canestan (Bayer AG), Detrusitol (Pfizer) and Reductil (Abbott Laboratories) — against both the stopping power and news criteria. About the Author Trevor Acreman is head of healthcare at Millward Brown, UK. http://www.pharmexeceurope.com/europharmexec/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=510936&sk=8ced2b41b0d7d0b85c678bf1ba41f2cf http://brainfingerprinting.com/AdMap.php http://brainfingerprinting.com/AdMap.php
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