• by Charlene Weisler , Op-Ed Contributor, March 10, 2016

Get ready for the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual Re!Think conference, which runs from March 14 to 16 and offers new, ground-breaking research on cross-platform and mobile measurement that looks at both creative and the optimization of advertising deliveries.

Gayle Fuguitt, ARF’s CEO and president, spoke to me about what attendees can expect from this year’s conference, in an interview that’s been condensed and edited.

Charlene Weisler: What is the theme of this year’s ARF Re!Think?

Gayle Fuguitt: It is an evergreen theme: How advertising works. The ARF has been studying how advertising works since its inception 80 years ago, but what we are doing this year is rethinking how advertising works today. And we subtitled it “Measure Up” because measurement is so important. We are asking, do your solutions and does your team measure up?

Weisler: What are some of the results being presented?

Fuguitt: What we did in one short year was to embark on original research. We convened 40 industry leaders for four hours and charged them with designing seven experiments spanning three topics: cross-platform measurement, cross-platform measurement in the world of creative including neuroscience, and mobile measurement (because we all know how important mobile is today). We embarked on three of those experiments.   

I am very excited to announce that at this conference, we are going to be unveiling work that is at such scale and magnitude that has not been seen in over 40 years.    

Weisler: Can you give me a short description of these three experiments?

Fuguitt: Sure. The first experiment was about comprehensive cross-platform measurement. The C suite is asking, “Do my marketing dollars drive growth in sales?” and “If I have one more dollar to spend on advertising, where should I spend it?” 

We examined 5,000 advertising campaigns with $365 billion of ad spending across 41 countries and involved 500 different brands and 100 categories.

The second experiment was taking the insights we have about cross platform and moving them to understanding how brands are built in the brain. In this study we used neuroscience research across platforms.

The third area was mobile.  We know that consumers use it as a wizard -- for GPS, for location locator -- so we knew that we could ask them a lot of important research questions to understand how to create advertising that would reach them better. Today’s consumer wants what they want when they want it. So we looked at a very specific checklist to see how research could be conducted on a mobile phone.   

Used in combination, actionable insights from these three studies will provide a smart spending “roadmap” for marketers to invest their dollars.

All of the research and insights that will be shared by key leaders from across the industry at this year’s conference should well-equip attendees to effectively navigate how advertising works today.