And then you have the idiotic ads that are interesting, memorable, exciting, and nobody remembers what they were selling.
If people say, “I saw this awesome TV commercial yesterday. It was really cool. I can’t remember what company it was for, but…” – that’s a BAD commercial.
I’m afraid I have to disagree strongly with this. Due to the efficiencies of mass marketing, I’d estimate that at least 90% of ad budgets are wasted!
There are professors in business schools who specialize in ad research and there are academic journals on advertising.
I have dealt with people in advertising and the thing is no one thing works for everyone.
Some ads are very effective and those are the ones people want.
For instance, Candice Bergen’s Sprint commericals and the Polaroid commerical with James Garner and Mariette Hartley were huge successes and were credited with saving the companies. But this is rare.
Conversely we had a local commerical by a car dealership called “Long Chevrolet” which featured a kid who did the commerical named “Timmy.” Almost everyone hated that ad, but it was hated so much it actually turned into a huge success as the ad everyone loved to hate. Attempts by others to replicate such ads failed.
Many companies want to have an Internet presence and while this is important, still consumers WANT to buy their products in person. They mostly use the Internet to seek out prices. Amazon and eBay have sell through rates around 20% and this is very good. Most companies click through rates are measured in tenths of one percent.
I absolutely agree with this. 
If an ad is entertaining, but doesn’t effectively deliver the brand’s message, it’s a waste of money. Too often, you see ads that will look really good on someone’s reel / resume, but are a disservice to the advertiser.
Full disclosure: I’m a partner at an ad agency I founded.
There are a kajillion ways to measure the impact of an ad campaign. It all depends what you want to measure. That, in turn, depends on what business goal(s) the ad was designed to address.
I’m oversimplifying here, but there are generally two schools of advertising: brand and direct response. Brand advertising campaigns are embarked upon in order to increase awareness, improve attitudes toward the brand, increase purchase intent and a bunch of other such things that are somewhat fuzzy and comparatively difficult to measure. Direct response campaigns are geared toward compelling an immediate action.
DR campaigns are generally more easily measured. Think about Billy Mays and his shitty Mighty Putty ads for a second. Again, I’m oversimplifying, but generally, the company managing that ad buy will determine its effectiveness by how many orders they get for Mighty Putty within a few minutes after the commercial runs. They’ll look at things like where the ad ran, who called the 1-800 number, who came to the website, who placed orders and how many orders resulted in successful credit card transactions. Whether or not the ad was successful depends largely on whether they got enough orders to justify the cost of the ad. There’s a whole wrinkle of DR I’d rather not get into right now that deals with managing your media and production costs to a specific volume of orders at an acceptable Cost Per Order - but you didn’t ask about that.
Branding campaigns have much more fuzzy success criteria. Typically, an ad agency sets campaign goals with a client that are derived from their overall business goals. If you were sitting in the meeting, you’d hear something like “We want to increase market share a full point, and we think we can do that if we move baseline awareness up 7 percent.” The ad agency does its thing - designing ads, figuring out where they’re going to run, figuring out how to measure success, etc. In a situation like this, the ad agency might separate a group of people into two groups - one made up of people who saw the ad (“exposed” group) and the other made up of people who didn’t see it (“control group”). They’ll give both groups a survey, asking all sorts of goofy questions about whether they’re aware of the product or the brand, whether they intend to buy it or not, how they feel about it, etc. Comparing the results of the surveys from the exposed group back to the control group will yield some insights. If the lift in awareness from exposed to control is 7% or more, the ad would be deemed a success.
There are a kajillion different wrinkles here, but that’s the gist of it. Entire businesses have been built on measuring ad effectiveness, the proper mix of media spending across channels, and just about anything else you’d want to know about an ad campaign - one could write an entire book about it.
Incidentally, if you’re surfing the web one day and you see an ad for taking a quick survey, odds are that ad came from one of three companies - Dynamic Logic, Insight Express or FactorTG. These three companies are ad effectiveness measurement companies that are trying to get a gauge on whether or not your impression of a specific brand has been impacted by some of the online ads you’ve seen. If you elect to click on the ad and take the survey, you’ll be asked all sorts of questions about awareness, favorability, purchase intent and whatnot. The survey results will be tallied and then the research company will decide whether you’re an “exposed” or “control” based on the information planted in your browser cookies by ad servers. They report this information back to the advertiser so that the advertiser (and its agency) can figure out whether the ads are working or not.
Would you consider a positive 2% response to be a 98% waste? Direct (junk) mail considers a 2% response a success.
One of the more disappointing things in my professional career was when the not-for-profit organization I worked for scared up a few bucks to run an ad (excuse me, “underwriting announcement”) campaign on our local NPR station. On paper, it should have been perfect. The campaign lasted for a month, which should have been long enough to see some results. Our website was clearly mentioned, we got some prime positions on the schedule and our donor base was almost perfectly in line with the NPR station’s demographics.
And nothing happened. No additional traffic to the website, no change in donations, no requests for literature, no one called us and asked “what do you folks do, exactly?” Other than the members of our board saying they had heard the announcements, they came and went without a trace.
On the other hand, whenever we got a mention in the paper or on radio or TV news we saw an immediate and substantial increase in visits to the website.
The best I could conclude for the executive director and the board was that people weren’t interested in who we were but were very interested in what we do.
I hope you understood that I knew they went out of production. That was precisely my point. Let me try it again more slowly for you :-).
Relevant to the OP’s question about the imnpact ceasing advertising, this was a perfect example of a very well-known, very long established (since the 1920s) national brand which simply stopped advertising.
And after they stopped advertising, their mind share fell rapidly to zero.
The fact you couldn’t have bought a 2007 Olds (because they didn’t exist) is really immaterial to my point that you wouldn’t have *thought *to buy an Olds in 2007 because you’d forgotten about them by then.
And then there is the advertiser who spends maybe $50,000 to $75,000 per month in one city. Think of your local car dealer (pre-bust). They can not afford to spend $50,000 on survey research to evaluate ads that change from month to month, depending on the financing deals and offers. So these people evaluate their advertising based on what their wife thinks of it. That explains why so many car dealers have their kids in the ads…