Up to the test

Like many a creative before me I have a hate/hate even more relationship with the methods of testing advertising. I once worked as the personal slave to a grumpy old creative director who said on the agency reel no less that he didn’t write for consumers any more.Instead he wrote for Millward Brown. This highly esteemed and even more highly rewarded company is one of many who have a prescription for telling clients whether the advertising the agency has sold them will work. The old curmudgeon I worked for did have a point. After you experience the soul tearing bad reviews of your work by a company like Millward Brown or Ipsos or Neilson or any of the others you retreat bleeding to your cave and resolve never to let that happen again. So you learn their hit points, what scores and doesn’t and you produce work as nimble as a ballet dancer with lead feet. Every now and then, like the cicadas that crawl up from the ground every 17 years comes along a creative director determined to fight the system and produce work unconstrained by the laws of testing. It may be someone from the elite agencies we hear about around the campfire late at night, the agencies that don’t have to have their work tested and qualified to run. This person usually lasts for a few months by which time they have suffered a brain hemorrhage from trying to get his or her head around what the testing methodology is forcing the advertising idea to do. And it doesn’t help that many client brand teams have an interest in testing that goes beyond curiosity. I’ve known brand teams whose bonus is linked to success at testing. If the evil stopped at that I wouldn’t be so alarmed. What really gets me mad is when work that has done backflips to pass the testing goes on to bomb in market. No work goes out unless it has passed testing with flying colors. So how can it fail in market? What is the relationship between testing and actual performance? That’s something that probably needs to be tested. This disconnect is something that a lot of companies turn a blind eye to because it raises very fundamental uncomfortable questions. If testing can’t be a predictor of market success then why test. Equally ridiculous is the amount of weight given to the preliminary communication checks that involve 18 women in Hackensack NJ or the equivalent discussing the pro’s and cons of your work. Don’t get me wrong it’s an invaluable tool for uncovering new turns of language and potential communication disasters. But that’s it. Unfortunately many people report and stick to the verbatims as if they were delivered in stone from atop a mountain and represent the infallible word of god the holy consumer. When 18 sketchy folks in a room off an interstate somewhere are responsible for green-lighting your project it speaks a lot about the inability of the client to feel the work and trust their instincts and their agency. Like I said I have a hate/hate even more relationship with all testing and mostly because when work tests well and the gang of 18 love the work I am so creepily and pathetically grateful. I roll over for a belly rub like the pathetic ad-ho I am. A jury of genius’s  agree with me and love my work. Oh happy day.