• by Graeme Hutton , Op-Ed Contributor, October 2, 2008

If you think you are rational and objective, don't read this column. Instead, I'd like you to please turn to your computer and search for "IAT" - Implicit Association Test. If you do this your search results should include a link for a demo test from Harvard. Do it. Take one.

The subjects in which you can test your objectivity include gender, religion, sexuality and several topical categories, such as Obama vs. McCain. IATs give you less than a second to decide between two alternatives. That split-second choice will - over multiple responses - reveal a bias of which you may not have been aware, prejudices of which you may not be proud.

In Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell reveals that an IAT test indicated he had an implicit pro-white association. Yet he is half black - his mother is Jamaican. Blink demonstrates the danger of relying on a single statistic to make an advertising or media decision: Just because you pose reasonable questions to willing consumers, it is far from guaranteed that you will obtain accurate or meaningful answers.

IATs stem from a branch of research called biometrics, which has the potential to sweep the advertising world in the next few years. Just as Google revolutionized the Internet search market, biometrics may well be poised to do the same for television advertising - including creative testing.

In good old-fashioned television parlance, let's ripple dissolve to a recent article in the globally respected European advertising planning and research magazine, Admap. When our dissolve sequence ends, we see in front of us the February 2008 edition of Admap. Here, Jerry Thomas, president and CEO of Decision Analyst, a market research and analytics organization headquartered in Texas, says that as few as 1 percent of all ads are tested among consumers.
Consequently, he reasonably asserts, "No one - neither agency nor client - really knows if the advertising is any good." He goes on to describe eight barriers to great advertising that creative testing could help resolve, including a poignant scenario in which he claims some creative agencies use a variety of tactics "to delay, undermine and thwart the efforts to test objectively their creative 'babies.'?"

Fear not: Google TV analytics may be at hand. With its television set-top box research, Google TV has established such a large sample size - 3 million, plus - that it blows away all previous audience-measurement concepts. We can now see second-by-second changes in TV-set viewing which a) are squarely based on actual TV-set viewing behavior, and b) track TV-set ad tune-out data on a second-by-second basis, which is statistically significant at a microscopic level.

Aggregating the data over the viewing of many tv commercials, the results are seismically far-reaching in their implications. They can show the typical audience tune-out for a TV ad and how that tracks across its 30-second lifespan.

According to Google, audience tune-out for any one TV ad typically peaks within the first four seconds of the ad and then declines across the remaining 26 seconds. Having monitored the performance of many ads, we can see how our ads compare against others, thus providing two illuminating benchmarks.

We can determine how quickly people tune out of our ad compared to others. Is our ad - or is our competitor's ad - a star or a dog? In other words, this is creative testing in the real world. By tracking it over time, we can see how our ad's audience tune-out increases by repeat exposure. This is real-time ad wear-out measurement.

So Google's set-top box audience data can rewrite the TV creative research agenda. It doesn't rely on verbal responses from consumers - it's biometrics on an immense scale.

In Joseph Jaffe's book Join the Conversation, he asks the rhetorical question: "How many of you ... believe that advertising in five years will look anything like it looks today?" In truth, I could opt for the maverick response and postulate it will be strikingly similar. Consumers will still feel that advertising ignores them and is too remote, and Jerry Thomas's caveats will still hold true about creative testing. Will anything have really changed? Possibly not - except for the fact that TV set-top box measurement may very well lead a biometrics revolution that many in our industry haven't even dreamed about.

Graeme Hutton is senior vice president and director of consumer insights at Universal McCann. (graeme.hutton@universalmccann.com)