Abstract:

This manuscript discusses the development of the Canadian Media Directors Council (CMDC) Television Commercial Awareness Model. The CMDC model allows advertisers to estimate the awareness levels that are generated from television advertising media schedules. Software has been created that will allow the user to generate "what- if" scenarios to determine which media schedule generates the highest levels of awareness. The CMDC model represents a significant advancement in advertising media planning. The model provides greater predictive accuracy and diagnostic ability than available models by incorporating more influential variables and focusing on individual product categories. Specifically, the model uses GRP levels, the impact of daypart distribution, media schedule, commercial length and quality of the creative execution as input variables. The model can be used with mature brands because it examines recall of specific television commercials/campaigns instead of brand awareness. The model that was developed was based on a modification of Broadbent's ADSTOCK model. This is a distributed lag approach which assumes that advertising in past periods continues to have an effect, but at a diminishing rate. The model that was developed produced error rates from 2.4% - 5.3%. Analysis of the data raised questions regarding one of the most prominent debates in the academic literature: the shape of the advertising response curve. While the literature suggests S-shaped and concave downward response curves, these shapes failed to appear in the CMDC database.