Going beyond the rational - adSpark™

The marketing world has shifted irrevocably from the traditional 'Interrupt and Persuade' rational model of advertising to a place where a meerkat fan club can help set a brand alight! Yet many advertising pre-testing tools are blunt instruments when it comes to contagious, emotional response, and sometimes miss great ads.

Most pre-testing methods still concentrate on rational persuasion, yet one of the most important aspects of evaluating today's advertising is to understand the effect it has on a consumer's emotional engagement with the brand. adSpark™ is the first ad- testing product that tells you how people really feel about advertising and identifies those ads capable of spreading 'brand contagion'.

Sometimes it is hard to pick out the 'great' ads from the merely 'good'. With adSpark™ consumers are much more likely to use extremes of scales to show how they really feel - pulling apart response to different advertising executions.

That's because adSpark™ uses interactive Metaphorix® and infeXious™ animations as a shortcut to consumers' emotional responses - alongside rational questioning - picking up underlying effects on brand engagement and contagiousness that would otherwise be missed.

Metaphorix®, is our award-wining online tool for measuring emotional engagement with new product ideas and brands. It brings metaphors to life though animated visuals, into which the respondent projects himself through a self-selected avatar.

Its key benefits to marketers and advertisers are that it avoids the over-rationalisation and, because the animations are so intuitive and engaging, it allows respondents to express their gut reaction more freely. This is particularly helpful in assessing new advertising ideas- where consumers often find it hard to verbalise their feelings.

infeXious™ is a new generation online tool specifically created to help marketers and advertisers create great social ideas - ideas that inspire us to share them with others, and ideas that work across the various media opportunities that exist today.

It allows respondents to employ their imaginative empathy to identify the contagiousness of advertising ideas that have not yet aired.

In short, infeXious™ helps create the next Cadbury's Gorilla, Cheryl Cole, meerkat, or "Yes We Can" by getting to the heart of what makes ideas contagious.

infeXious™ breaks contagion down into its component parts - each informing a visual metaphor representative of a particular aspect of contagiousness, such as Buzz, Belonging, Numinosity, and Energy.

By integrating Metaphorix® and infeXious™ with more conventional questioning techniques, adSpark™ looks at all aspects of consumer response to an ad: conscious and unconscious; rational and emotional.

This unique non-verbal approach can be employed universally to measure engagement with brands and advertising - again a key benefit as advertising is often designed for a multi-country audience.

adSpark™ also makes the interview more interesting and involving for the respondent - turning them into participants - which reduces dropout and yields higher quality data and richer verbatim comments, giving better guidance on how to improve your communication.

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