Communication Arts

The Communication Arts/Readex Advertising Awareness Study is one of the most in-depth studies on advertising effectiveness in the business. You’ll not only find out what actions were taken after readers viewed your ad, but you’ll get numbers on how your ad compared with the ads of other advertisers.

You'll also see what the readers thought about the actual design of your ad. Did it grab their attention? Was it believable? Did it have enough information in it? We also include verbatim comments, straight from the readers themselves.

Here’s How It Works

Rating Your Ad’s Creative

In the first section, readers rate each ad on a scale of 1 to 5 with regard to three dimensions:
• Attention-getting ability – the ad’s stopping power.
• Believability – whether or not it’s credible.
• Information value – whether or not there is “enough information to make a decision.”

Measure Actions Prompted By The Ad

The second section of the ad study gets readers to list which actions they’ve taken or plan to take as a result of seeing your ad. Results often demonstrate that although not every ad (or product) is one that has readers picking up the phone to place an order, readers are taking action as a result of seeing the ad.

Find Out What They’re Saying About Your Ad

The third section contains verbatim comments. These direct quotes put life behind the numbers, and give you the opportunity to learn what your customers and prospects think. Whereas the first two sections of the report tell what happened, this section usually explains why. The study is designed to generate open-ended responses and typically yields about 60 comments per studied ad.

Summing It Up

At the conclusion of the study, you’ll receive a complete report on how your ad fared. The report is broken out by category. In addition, we assist you with interpreting the results by including an executive summary, as well as additional data to compare how your ad measured up against all ads in the magazine.

The result: A concise report, that would cost thousands of dollars to do on your own, that lets you know what’s working with your ad, and what’s not.

How To Participate

To participate, you must advertise in the May/June or September/October issues of Communication Arts. The study is provided FREE to advertisers at our 3x rate level or better, $895 otherwise.

A Message Impact Study can be performed in other issues for a cost of $8,955.

To sign up, please contact Valerie Halaby at .

Testimonials

“The numbers give us valuable feedback into what we’re doing—right or wrong. We may not always like the results, but that’s the beauty of your ad studies and why we keep doing them. Sometimes we may be too close to our marketing efforts to be objective.”

Jeffrey Burke
President and CEO
PictureArts

“I love the bar graphs—they give me a quick, visual and you’re the only one who does that. The quotes in the back give me details on what people really think about Xerox. Plus your succinct overview is very nice, too.”

Carolyn Zimmer
Assn’t Media Planer for the Xerox account
Media Edge CIA

“My job is to show management how best to reach our audience, and these ad studies are like a roadmap. Between the quantitative results and verbatim opinions, it’s pretty clear what we need to do (or continue doing) after reading them.”

Tom Wright
Design & Advertising Director
Neenah Paper

“We don’t use an outside ad agency, and we usually don’t have access to this kind of external feedback. That’s why it’s so useful. In fact, we immediately implemented the recommendations that came from the last ad study.”

Hanan Gelbendorf
Scanner Product Marketing Manager
Creo Americas

“We love them—good reviews or not. They give us an objective opinion, one more piece of information. And it’s not just the statistics, but the verbatims as well that is very valuable.”

Lisa House
Principle
Williams & House (agency for Mohawk Paper)

“For us, the ad study confirmed our objective: we wanted people to see and touch our paper, and tell us what they thought of it. Fortunately, most of the responses were very positive, but even those that weren’t were very useful.”

Duke Reich
President
Reich Paper

“These ad studies are great. We learn how the marketplace views us compared to the rest of the industry. Plus, they make us work a little harder each time to see if we can beat our previous scores.”

Adrian Maynard
Marketing Manager
JupiterImages/Photos.com

“It’s not always what we want to hear, but we need to hear it.”

Steve Pigeon, President
John McDonald, Vice-President
MasterFile