Online Testing Leads To TV Ad Success For Dotcoms

Here's a weird tangential story about how online testing of ads leads to success on TV. Ace Metrix just released a report stating that top 10 and bottom 10 television ads for Dotcoms. The main deciding factor? Is it a Google ad or not. No, seriously, the main factor was online testing, but Google did nab five top ten and zero bottom ten and they do loads of testing says Ace Metrix.

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Online Testing Leads To TV Ad Success

So it seems that online video advertising that is effective can then be effective as TV advertising, there's an interesting twist that could see some bid ad money dropped into online video ads soon as a test bed for more effective TV spends, which are generally more expensive.

According to Ace Metrix:

"The main differences between the dot.com ads that performed well and those that performed poorly is (1) testing—Google tests their ads on YouTube fairly extensively before buying TV air time, and (2) storytelling: Google creates ads that, first, tell a compelling story and, second, sell. Consumers respond to this.

"The poor Super Bowl appearances by dot.coms show just how little testing is done, as well as a general lack of understanding of the impact of a poor spot. Go Daddy has perennially performed poorly with highly polarizing ads, and Groupon and Living Social also had major whiffs with viewers. The biggest mistake these companies make is in not testing the ads before they run during such a massively expensive and important media event," Daboll commented.

So on top of the online testing what they're basically saying is don't just throw up "SUNDAY! SUNDAY! SUNDAY!" in a TV ad. That crap might work for radio, but not TV. We are watching a story and you are interrupting it with your advertising, so use it to also tell a story and we'll be more interested in listening to what you have to say.

Here's a great example. During a lot of the Time Warner on-demand stuff I watch there's a horrible, horrible ad for a tax agency. It's repetitive and annoying, plus it's all really shitty CGI animation that looks like it was made on a Commodore-64 which makes me think A) they have zero customers B) they have zero respect for their business C) they have no idea about video marketing and D) who the hell would want them to do their taxes?!

Now your taxes are far different than your choice of search engine or email, some might see them as more important and others as less. Either way, if  you're going to do any kind of video advertising you definitely want to make sure that it's effecitve and memorable, and not in the way I remember that tax agency ad (they might be tax attorneys, I'm not even sure). Ace Metrix has just given you a way to link your TV ads to your online video campaigns and shows that you can definitely take online ads and transform them into effective TV ads, even though it's far more difficult to do it the other way round.

So without further ado, I bid you adieu with their lists of top and bottom dotcom TV ads for 2001 YTD

*Definition: Ace Score is the measure of ad creative effectiveness based on viewer reaction to national TV ads. Respondents are randomly selected and representative of the U.S. TV viewing audience. The results are presented on a scale of 0-950, which represents scoring on creative attributes such as relevance, persuasion, watchability, information, attention, etc.

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