Question

Selecting a Specific Ad for Evaluation Select and analyze any ONE specific media advertisement of a brand, product or service. You can choose any of the following:

(a) A TV commercial* OR (b) A magazine ad or a newspaper ad OR (c) An outdoor or transit ad (such as an ad in MTR stations or on bus body, a billboard) * If you want to study a video found on the Internet, make sure this ad has been broadcasted on TV.

§ Your selected ad should have been launched in Hong Kong.

§ This ad should have been launched anytime during 2015-2020.

§ You should not choose an ad that was launched on digital media only.

PART (1) EVALUATION OF YOUR SELECTED AD

PART (2) SUGGESTION OF A NEW VERSION FOR THE AD.

Answer 1

reviews and critiques the standardization debate in international advertising strategy. First, the paper identifies the standardization, adaptation and compromise schools of advertising including their advantages and disadvantages and then presents some of the contingency models with special focus on variables related to products, customer segments and organization. Then, a number of deficiencies in the academic literature as a whole are presented. The conclusion is that the preferred school of advertising is the compromise school, but that the continuum perspective is of little use to practitioners as they want to know what variables determine the position on the standardization continuum in their sector and whether the level of standardization is increasing or decreasing.

This debate has been going on for more than four decades without a resolution. Advocates of standardization claim that global market segments are emerging and that advertising not only can, but also should be standardized across markets. The major benefits from standardization are economies of scale in the advertising function and consistent brand image. Advocates of adaptation claim that the difference between cultures is so vast that standardization is not possible and that standardization results in lost competitive advantage and lower sales. However, to adapt advertising each market increases costs and decreases possibilities to create synergies across markets. There are a number of deficiencies in the academic literature as a whole namely, the lack of definition of a standardized advertisement, standardization and adaptation schools take too extreme positions, compromise school too vague and the contingency models are too complex to be useful, comparisons across surveys are difficult, lack of quantified financial implications of advertising strategies and finally, lack of value-creating foundation for the standardization decision.

Levitt (1983) argues that “a powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology”. The existence of a global market leads to standardized products. However, many academics disagreed with Levitt (1983) and argued against the existence of global markets.

The first advocate of standardization was David L. Brown, Advertising Manager at Goodyear Tyre and Rubber, who in 1923 stated that humanity possessed certain common attributes and concluded that it was possible and logical to standardize advertisements across countries. However, the real debate about standardization started in the 1950s and has been going on since then without a conclusion (Hite and Fraser, 1988). As explained later in this paper, there are three basic approaches to advertising – standardization, adaptation and a combination of both (compromise school and contingency perspective) (Kanso, 1992). Proponents of the compromise school and contingency perspective suggest that the most effective advertising combines the two approaches and that the best advertising strategy depends on the situation.

The evaluation of advertisement effectiveness during the advertisement design phase and pre-launch phase is critical for the advertisement’s success in the targeted market. While the purpose of an advertisement is to build a certain impression of a product or serviece and/or to produce sales (Thomas, 2007), the effectiveness of an advertisment is based on making a tangible contribution to a company or to a brand by impacting on customers’ buying decisions through advertisements (Wells, 1997). In other words, the effectiveness of an advertisement is the power that the advertisement has to change markets and to improve profit margins. Based on the power of advertising, advertisement effectiveness has significant financial implications for advertisers. Before the final launch, the advertisers usually apply a variety of measures, including psychological, sociological, economic, and other perspectives, to evaluate advertisement effectiveness. These measures focus on a general understanding of how advertising works. They are a form of customized research that predicts the in-market performance of an ad before it airs, by analyzing the audience levels of attention, brand linkage, motivation, entertainment, and communication. Traditionally, advertising effectiveness is assessed by an approach called copy testing, which includes both the pre-testing and the post-testing of advertisements in print or broadcast. Effectiveness measures used in copy testing include Aided and Unaided recall tests of the brand name or advertisement, Attitude Tests, Inquiry Tests, and Sales Tests

Advertising has two types of power: short-term power, such as the power of conveying new information, building awareness, enhancing credibility, etc., and long-term power, such as conveying brand image, attaching emotional values to the brand, building a positive reputation, etc. (Pieters et al., 1995). Considerable effort has been devoted to the understanding of the long-term and short-term factors that affect advertising effectiveness. Whereas long-term effects can be gauged by assessing the advertisement’s impact on the customers’ structure of decisions, attitude, preferences, beliefs and intentions as well as the sales, the level of the short-term effect is mainly represented by the customers’ attention to the advertisment (Lavidge and Steiner, 1961). As an immediate response, attention is important because it serves as the antecedent of longterm impact, and it offers practical insights for the advertisement (Broach and Thomas, 1997). It has long been recognized that attention is a significant factor affecting advertising effectiveness (Corkindale and Kennedy, 1975). It is believed that Lewis was the first to suggest that effective salesmanship requires that salesmen attract the attention of customers, maintain their interest, and create a desire (Lewis, 1898). The AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) model introduced by Strong (Edward, 1925) was probably the earliest advertising model in the literature.

Unlike the previous research, our research focuses on TV commercials rather than print, but we use the eye tracking method as well. The study determines cognitive attitudes by analyzing continuous audience eye data in relation to a timeline of the TV commercial scenes. The selected attribute of audience eye movements is blinking frequency for two reasons. The first reason is that blinking frequency is one of the most important indicators of visual attention. The other reason is based on the conclusion of Jacob Klen and Peder Wolkoff, that viewing an advertisement is an external stimuli to the eye, which causes eye blinking and affects the blinking rate (Klen and Wolkoff, 2004). Furthermore, in this section we propose a novel method for assessing the effectiveness of TV commercial advertising by using the automated capturing and analysis of audience eye movements. This method is based on the assumption that some attributes of audience eye movements are correlated to their visual attention as defined in the context of TV commercial advertisement effectiveness.Conclusion Existing studies indicate that eye activities have a close relationship with attention and that eye data change with human visual attention. In the present research we studied an objective approach to quantify advertisement effectiveness through capturing and analyzing the attributes of audience eye movements. We conducted three experiments to verify our hypotheses and to find a quantitative relationship between the values of eye movement attributes and the levels of advertisement effectiveness. Our experiments show that while watching TV advertisements the audience eye blinking frequency is correlated to the audience attention. In addition, by analyzing the patterns of audience BF, we can predict the effectiveness ranking of a set of TV advertisements in terms of audience attention, and the predicted ranking will be identical to that obtained from conventional attitude rating surveys. The results of three experiments have several implications for assessing advertising effectiveness. First, blinking frequency is lower when watching attractive ads or scenes than when watching unattractive ads or scenes. Furthermore, the audience blinking frequency can be plotted as a line with the timeline. From the line, the audience attention level to the TV commercial can be obtained directly, playing an important role in TV commercials’ effectiveness evaluations. Last but not least, the experiments’ results indicate that the audience’s blinking frequency pattern has less variability while subjects watch an attractive TVC than when they watch a less attractive TVC. These results provide considerable evidence that the effectiveness of TVadvertisements can be measured by audience BF patterns when viewing them. This, in turn, raises the possibility of developing automated advertisement effectiveness evaluation systems, which would be significantly more cost effective than traditional questionnaire-based methods.

As the virtual environment is constantly changing, not only users’ informational and
knowledge needs but also the means and channels of communication with customers applied by
organizations change. There is a noticeable trend to move more and more advertising campaigns to
social media networks because of the opportunities they provide to organizations and users, which
results in the ever-increasing popularity of social media networks and a number of their users. Such a
transition is explained by one of the main objectives organizations have: to inform their customers in
an appropriate way and receive feedback on social media networks, which is difficult when traditional
advertising channels and means are applied. Since advertising campaigns on social media networks,

are evolving rapidly, their assessment factors and methods, which receive controversial opinions in
both scientific literature and practice, change too. Researchers assess and interpret the factors that
influence the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on social media networks differently

,eight
primary factors that influence the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on social media networks
were identified: sales, content reach, traffic to website, impressions, frequency, relevance score, leads
and audience growth.

Most experts
(58%) indicated that the average advertising campaign on social network lasts for more than 30 days,
22%—from 15 to 30 days, 12%—from eight to 14 days and 8%—up to 7 days. Study results show that
an advertising campaign on social media networks usually lasts for more than 30 days

Experts say that the budget for advertising campaigns on social media networks depends on
the strategy each organization has and the specific nature of their activity. Most experts (68%) on
average spend more than 1000 EUR on an advertising campaign on social networks, 24%—from 500 to
1000 EUR and the remaining 8% spend less than 500 EUR

More than half of the experts (54%) noted that advertising campaigns on social media networks
have more than 7000 loyal users on social networks: 16%—from 5000 to 7000 loyal users, 17%—from
2500 to 5000 users and the remaining 13%—less than 2500 users. The study found out that the greater
the expert’s experience in leading advertising campaigns on social media networks is, the larger
number of loyal consumers on social networks they have

For most experts (64%) it took from two to three work days to assess the effectiveness of an
advertising campaign on social media networks: 22%—from 4 to 7 work days, 12%—more than a
work week and only 2% managed to assess the effectiveness of the campaign in one work day. Study
results show that quite much time and effort is spent on assessing the effectiveness of an advertising
campaign

Experts highlighted that, when assessing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on social
media networks, they encounter the problem of the non-existence of a universal tool, and that is why
they integrate such tools as Facebook Ads Manager (100%) and Google Analytics (59%). According to
experts, the Facebook Ads Manager platform does not estimate the conversions and sales accurately,
while orders can only be seen on Google Analytics platform, but there is also a problem that declined

orders are also counted. Due to the reasons mentioned, 64% of experts apply assessment systems
compiled by the organization or themselves, because there is a need to receive precise information of
how many users saw the advertising campaign, how many of them purchased the product (service)
offered by the organization, how many of them shared the message, and other aspects. Such assessment
systems pay most attention to the implementation of the plan, number of sales, and the payback of the
advertising campaign.