CopyCheck® of Animatic Ads
Category: Insurance
Methods: CopyCheck®, Advertising Research, Sales Forecasting and Sales Modeling
Summary
A large health insurance provider was in the process of updating its advertising messaging. The provider created several new advertising concepts, but didn’t know which one(s) would resonate the most with potential customers. Decision Analyst suggested using its proprietary CopyCheck® system for evaluating and improving advertising concepts, early stage print ads, TV storyboards, and radio scripts.
Strategic Issues
The large health insurance provider typically introduces a new advertising campaign each summer/fall in advance of the open-enrollment period. This advertising runs throughout the rest of the year until the next summer/fall. Every year, this insurance provider’s ads changed, but were all built around a central message. However, the insurance provider was considering taking its advertising in a new direction with a new advertising message, due to the reasons listed below:
- They had been using the same message for many years and felt its freshness and attention value had diminished.
- Other insurance companies had begun using a similar message, thereby potentially diluting the advertising’s uniqueness.
Research Objectives
With the help of their advertising agency, the insurance provider had created several advertising concepts with new messages. However, before they went through the expense of developing full commercials for each message, they wanted to know which of the new advertising concepts and campaigns resonated most with potential customers. Additionally, the insurance provider wanted to know what elements of the top concepts could be improved on, what parts viewers remembered most, and what they thought was missing.
Research Design and Methods
Given the needs of the project, Decision Analyst recommended using its proprietary CopyCheck® system to evaluate and improve these early-stage advertising concepts. The CopyCheck® system contains the following key measures and diagnostics:
- Communication Measures such as attention value, brand name registration, main idea playback, and missing information.
- Commercial Comments such as likes/dislikes and suggested improvements.
- Advertising Effectiveness Measures such as persuasion and brand reinforcement.
- Statistical Norms are available as a directional benchmark.
The insurance provider and its advertising agency created about a dozen TV animatic commercials for testing. Using the standard CopyCheck® questionnaire, each respondent monadically evaluated a single ad execution. A total of about 100 respondents viewed each ad and then answered a series of questions about their reactions, including both open-ended and closed-ended questions.
Soft quotas were set to ensure that each ad was evaluated by a representative sample (by age, gender, ethnicity, and region). Respondents were required to currently have private health insurance.
Results
The above CopyCheck® measures and diagnostics provided the insurance provider with a “directional” estimate of each advertising concept’s probable effectiveness along with insightful diagnostic feedback for each ad concept. The measures were also able to identify which ad resonated most with consumers and warranted further development. The insurance provider and its advertising agency were able to review the ads’ diagnostics and open-end verbatim responses to learn what elements of the top-performing ads needed to be revised. The insurance provider then selected the top-three performing executions to develop and run in a multimillion dollar ad campaign.
CopyCheck® Services
For more information on CopyCheck® Services, please contact Bonnie Janzen, President (bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com), or call 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.