1. Introduction

2. Maximized Accountability: Proving That It Works 

3. The Naked King: Today's Advertising Research

4. Limitations of Marketing Research Frankly Confessed

5. The Lonely Advocate of Response Testing

6. How the Caples Method Works

7. Why Was Buried-Offer Testing Abandoned?

8. Time for a New Approach

9. How Response Testing Makes Advertising More Realistic

2. Maximized Accountability: Proving It Works  The Big Picture

All advertising campaigns - even those seeking mail orders begin by fostering a favorable awareness of the product or service advertised. The big difference in this respect between direct and indirect advertising is that the latter must create and build up lasting awareness. Awareness must linger in the prospect's mind until the opportunity or need arises at the retail level to do something about it.

In advertising by direct marketers, we know at once if the attempt we have made to create a favorable awareness of what we are selling has been successful. The public tells us right away, by its RESPONSE. When we fail, we can find out where we have failed by isolating the various parts of the message and testing each separately.

In advertising designed to build a lasting image of a brand, a company or a service, it takes much longer - sometimes $5 or $10 million longer - to find out what happened and why.

The problem is that attitudes and attitude changes are much more difficult to measure than ACTIONS. The effect of awareness predisposition and image building advertising depends not only on its content but also on weight and frequency of its exposure, and the prediction of attitudinal changes over time is a very tricky business.

If your selling process is to be maximized at every step, you must maximize the power of your awareness advertising or the awareness strengthening elements in your advertising.  And that calls for greater ACCOUNTABILITY and more precise MEASUREMENT of advertising while it is happening.

It also calls for more - and more exact - comparisons of advertising alternatives. Not just the old campaign versus the new campaign, but comparisons of a number of possible new campaign approaches and of different elements in the advertising TESTED AGAINST EACH OTHER.

The question of the actual sales effectiveness of a given advertising effect can be removed from both the realm of opinion and the imprecise evaluations of traditional advertising research. But it requires an open-minded exploration of the new options by an   advertising fraternity wedded to the past assumptions of the mass marketing era.