In Switzerland, the range of tracking models is still expandable
Only a few international companies can afford an expensive study to measure the impact of their advertising campaign in this country.
Only a few international companies can afford an expensive study to measure the impact of their advertising campaign in GermanyWolfgang J. Koschnick If you ask market research institutes whether they do advertising tracking, you always get the same answer: "Yes, of course, we track like the world champions. But is all that called tracking? Of course not.
If you poke around a bit in empirical data and look at what happened before and what happened after, you call that bit of gawking a tracking study right away. There's no way to avoid that. After all, tracking is not a protected trademark. You can't stop someone from calling it that if they're just juggling around with some data over time. Nevertheless, one should only talk about tracking if it is a real wave survey with at least two (better more) survey waves based on reasonably sufficient sample sizes.
In the Anglo-Saxon world - where the concept was invented - the content of an advertising tracking study is defined much more narrowly: it must be a continuous study with personal interviews, conducted at least at monthly or half-yearly intervals, but better still at weekly intervals, and the samples of which must in no case be less than 200 or 400 individuals or households. Larger samples are desirable, and it is now considered acceptable for the data to be collected by telephone survey.
Modest Swiss tracking models
More important than these formal features, however, is that the study does what it promises to do, namely that it tracks advertising campaigns over time and thereby brings to light useful results about the effect of the advertising media used. It thus collects indicators of advertising impact and examines their development over the course of an advertising campaign - hence the good old term campaign development study.
It's an excellent description of what tracking studies do. They examine the course of advertising campaigns to find out whether they achieve their communication goals and are worth the money. But in our Americanized world, it's simply no longer possible to put it in such Germanic terms.
In this narrow sense, there are very few tracking studies in Switzerland that really deserve the name. Yes, one can write without great exaggeration that Switzerland is a barren wasteland when it comes to advertising tracking. In Austria, a country of comparable size, there are a total of eight fully-fledged tracking studies with all the necessary trimmings. Some of them - such as the RollMA of the Linz Institute for Market and Social Analyses (Imas) - are so successful that they have been exported to Germany and - under a different name - also to Switzerland.
There are around 20 standardized tracking studies on offer in Germany. Some of them - such as RTL's Advertising Impact Compass, Sat 1's AdTrend study, the NIKO Advertising Index or the GfK Advertising Indicator/ATS - are among the most highly developed and sophisticated methods of global advertising tracking anywhere. In comparison, the models available in Switzerland look rather modest. Very modest, in fact.
AX Print and AX TV only survey trends
In fact, it is very difficult to say how many standardized tracking offers there are in Switzerland, because a whole series of studies call themselves such, but in reality are not advertising tracking studies at all. This is especially true of the continuous advertising tests that Demoscope offers under the names AX Print and AX TV as part of its Market Radar. The abbreviation AX stands for Advertising IndeX.
At best, the two individual studies, which test several hundred ads and TV spots per year at monthly intervals, can be described as a tracking of general advertising trends. They can be used to determine which types and forms of advertising particularly appeal to certain target groups and which new trends are emerging. But that's just something completely different from campaign-accompanying impact research in the form of wave surveys.
The Market Radar software makes it possible to read test results from your own advertising tests (Ad) into the test results of the advertising environment (from AX). In this way, a kind of benchmarking can be achieved. This makes it possible to see how well one's own advertising performs in comparison to the competition and in its target group, and how the competition is performing. All of this may be very useful. But it has very little to do with campaign-related impact research.
Tracking is often as expensive as a campaign
The Swiss advertising industry has to do without a larger selection of standardized tracking methods. This is a question of supply and demand. Swiss companies are generally of a completely different scale than international companies. The costs of continuous monitoring of advertising expenditure and advertising success in Switzerland are dangerously close to the level of national advertising campaigns themselves.
So it's hardly worth it, or only in the rarest of cases. Nevertheless, this is no explanation for the Swiss advertising industry's extensive tracking abstinence; because in comparison, Austria is a true tracking paradise.
Probably the best established model on the market is the Print Advertising Monitor (PAM), although it has only been around for a year. Tracking is still as young as a fresh spring day in Switzerland. After a pilot test in 1998, Publimedia, the key account company of Publicitas, launched the Print Advertising Monitor in the spring of 1999. With PAM, it offers its customers the opportunity to check whether advertising campaigns in print media are achieving their advertising goals.
Whether the PAM is a fully-fledged tracking study at all is a matter for considerable debate, although the point is absolutely clear: it is far too puny in its layout and design to merit the designation of advertising tracking. In fact, PAM is nothing more than a cross-title copy test for German-speaking Switzerland, documenting the transport performance of print campaigns. But at least it goes into the field on a monthly basis.
As indicators of advertising success, the Demoscope Institute uses a series of standard questions on advertising impact (aided recall, product interest and ad rating) on behalf of Publimedia and is also able to include additional questions on defined campaigns in the survey.
While numerous international tracking studies sometimes draw on ten or more indicators and thus draw from a large wealth of data, PAM makes do with just a few indicators. That is very modest.
The important thing is whether the scale with which you measure is correct
However, this should not be judged critically in principle. Whether a study has a single scale or many scales is basically immaterial. The only thing that matters is whether the scale (or scales) measures what it is supposed to measure. And if it does, it is even a requirement of parsimony - the principle of scientific proportionality between effort and yield - not to overload a study with the gigantic fuss of numerous measuring instruments that all end up measuring the same thing.
It's no secret that many tracking studies rely on ten or more indicators out of sheer ignorance. You don't know exactly how things are related to each other. So you choose a lot of indicators. One of them will measure something useful. And if not, then all of them together will certainly measure something useful. Research can be that primitive. In any case, the multitude of measurements will produce some kind of results that can be used to juggle and, above all, to trade. After all, market research has to sell itself...
PAM certainly cannot be accused of using too many indicators. There is no doubt that he takes the requirement of parsimony into account. But the result is also quite parsimonious. Since PAM has only been in existence for a year, impressive tracking experience cannot yet be reported. After all, Publimedia has now tested around 60 campaigns. The pool of impact data on campaigns in various markets is gradually growing.
In any case, PAM is primarily an instrument of generic marketing for print media. It provides publishers, agencies and advertising companies with arguments for the use of print media. That is also the only higher purpose of its existence.
Psychometer optimizes spots and their length
The AdTrack model of the Lucerne-based Link Institute for Market and Social Research is of a somewhat different caliber, but it too is content to measure a few parameters for testing advertising impact, namely spontaneous and aided advertising recall. This study, too, which has so far been used for a single client and is only just about to be opened up to other clients, can therefore by no means be accused of disregarding the principle of parsimony in the use of indicators.
An almost - but only almost - fully-fledged tracking model is the Psychometer of the Lucerne research institute Interdata, which, however, did not grow on Swiss soil. It emerged from the Austrian TV RollMA developed by the Imas Institute in Linz toward the end of the 1980s.
This in turn evolved from the RollMA. Since 1982, it has recorded the awareness presence of brands from a variety of product fields every two months, alternating with the Austrian Consumer Analysis (ÖVA). In 1988, this measurement procedure gave rise to the TV RollMA, the aim of which was to determine, in a detailed TV spot analysis, which characteristics and features have a positive impact on advertising impact and consumers' willingness to buy.
Today, the advanced study is known as Psychometer. The advertising industry owes it a series of groundbreaking findings on the optimum length of commercials and commercial breaks on television.
Like most econometric models of advertising effectiveness, the Psychometer is based on ideas from the psychology of learning: Consumers "learn" the content of advertising. The memory of what is learned diminishes over time if there is no reinforcement. The stronger the competition from other "learning material," the lower the "learning performance."
Theories about advertising pressure gather banalities
This explains the great importance that such studies assign to advertising pressure. Accordingly, the advertising impact depends on the advertising pressure exerted by an industry as a whole (external pressure) as well as the pressure exerted by the individual advertisers themselves (internal pressure). The conclusion from this is only seemingly logical and actually also falls behind well-worn clichés: if all competitors advertise a lot, you have to spend a lot of money to be heard at all in the general advertising din. In the much-cited advertising holes, on the other hand, namely in summer and winter, you have to spend much less money to make an impact.
But even the premise is questionable. The idea behind the "summer slump" in particular is that it is not worthwhile to advertise a lot because most of the target group is away. And if this assumption is correct, then the whole theory about large and not so large advertising pressure is for nothing.
So at least no one is surprised that the many fine theories about the sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker advertising pressure very rarely get beyond banalities: You can achieve much more with a lot of money than with little. But sometimes even a lot of money doesn't help if, for example, you have a big appetite for chocolate and go to an electronics store only to find out that you can't get chocolate there even for a lot of money. You have to direct your advertising communication very precisely at the target group if the investment is to be of any use. Unfortunately, this is not a matter of course in the age of TV advertising.
The communication monitor measures by channel
As an indicator of advertising success, Interdata has been measuring spontaneous and aided recall of a spot, its familiarity and recall of individual scenes based on storyboards as part of the Psychometer in Switzerland since 1992. To date, Interdata has tested just under 2,500 TV spots.
However, the psychometer is missing two essential elements for a tracking study: It is not a real wave survey with a sufficient sample size, but a pretest, a posttest or even a combination of both, depending on the customer's wishes. And only if a pretest and a posttest are used in combination with each other can the whole event be described as advertising tracking, if viewed in the most benevolent manner and with two eyes firmly closed.
Probably most astonishing of all is this: The large, all-powerful IHA-GfM Institute in Hergiswil, which is by far the largest market research institute in Switzerland with around 300 full-time employees and annual sales of almost 54 million Swiss francs, currently has just one, largely unknown standardized tracking study in its portfolio: the Communications Monitor. Little can be learned about it because the entire area of communications research at IHA-GfM is in a state of flux.
The question of branding is only asked at the end
One of the ways in which the Communication Monitor differs from other tracking systems is that it records all communication influences separately by channel - i.e. TV, print, posters, radio, cinema, Internet, events/sponsorship, direct mail, personal conversations, editorial contributions - and uses the chain of effects to record their influence on attitudes, liking, preference and more.
In doing so, it not only asks about perceived advertising, but only poses the question of branding at the end, in order to prevent the results from being distorted by notoriously well-known brands such as Coca-Cola. The monitor measures all the classic parameters of advertising impact and shows the correlations in the defined market between communication, attitudes, (brand) positioning and behavior.
Identical target persons must be able to be interviewed
In principle, any market research company that offers a multi-topic survey such as IHA-GfM's Interbus can of course also carry out tracking by including a series of campaign-related questions in this survey. But standardized tracking is something fundamentally different.
The decisive advantage - the cumulative gain of data over a large number of campaigns - cannot be offered by such multi-topic surveys used for tracking purposes.
However, with more than 20 retail and consumer panels alone, the IHA-GfM Institute offers a large number of studies that are often much more productive than some of the very crudely designed advertising tracking studies. The ideal instrument for observing and monitoring changes - including the effects of advertising - in market and media research is, after all, panels, i.e. samples of identical (and not merely similar) target persons who are always asked the same questions in several survey waves. The instrument is eminently suitable for identifying and analyzing changes in attitudes.
Insofar as surveys aim to ascertain the changes in attitudes brought about by the use of advertising, panels would in principle also be an excellent instrument for measuring them. However, they have the disadvantage of conditioning respondents so strongly through continuous exposure to the advertising messages under investigation that the overall results would be distorted.
Autumn promises tracking improvements
Nevertheless, the nebulous gloom over the Swiss tracking scene will be lifted a little this year. In the fall, IHA-GfM will launch the first major tracking study, the Swiss ATS (Advertising Tracking System),
which also meets international standards. It is an adaptation to the Swiss market of the GfK advertising indicator ATS developed by the German parent company - Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK) in Nuremberg.
GfK*ATS has been able to establish itself as an internationally applicable and constantly improved instrument in the German-speaking countries. Austrian Fessel-GfK is currently working on implementing this instrument in Central and Eastern Europe. The aim is to use a standard questionnaire, standardized and more precise analysis processes and a harmonized reporting system.
The Swiss ATS also relies on the classic variables of advertising tracking such as advertising and brand awareness, advertising recall, slogan awareness and
-association, use, purchase and brand images. Compared to other models, however, it is characterized by a stronger consideration of advertising-specific elements over brand-relevant aspects. In this way, Swiss ATS aims to take account of the strong importance of advertising for the success of the brand.
Continuity of tracking with monthly survey waves, if possible, is important; because meaningful results can only be achieved with a sufficient number of measurement points. Approaches such as data agglomeration from smaller, rolling samples or pooling concepts, i.e. the integration of several product categories into one survey wave, help to reduce the costs of continuous advertising tracking.
Lack of tracking studies is not a disaster
Sophisticated and highly differentiated tracking instruments, which are based on complex theories of advertising impact and have been permanently optimized over the course of many years, are practically non-existent in Switzerland. Studies such as IP Deutschland's Advertising Impact Compass (WWK), Sat 1's AdTrend or even the Niko Advertising Index are not yet to be found in this country. And it doesn't seem as if this should change much in the next few years.
This is perhaps not a big catastrophe, because in most tracking studies, effort and performance are somehow blatantly disproportionate. Huge mountains of data are always scrambled to produce nothing but insignificant mice of knowledge. There is no doubt that Switzerland is a leader when it comes to tracking.
a single research desert. But this desert is also an island of the blessed, because it spares the Swiss advertising industry a lot of survey hullabaloo that sometimes yields little and sometimes nothing at all that makes sense.
Advertising tracking in Switzerland
With this article, WerbeWoche continues the multi-part series of articles by trade journalist Wolfgang J. Koschnick on advertising tracking in Switzerland. The article following this part on the situation in Switzerland looks at some of the most developed international tracking models, presents the state of the art in tracking research, and examines the question of whether the Swiss advertising industry could not gain considerable insights into the effect of advertising over the course of a campaign by introducing a proper, sophisticated tracking study.
If you poke around a bit in empirical data and look at what happened before and what happened after, you call that bit of gawking a tracking study right away. There's no way to avoid that. After all, tracking is not a protected trademark. You can't stop someone from calling it that if they're just juggling around with some data over time. Nevertheless, one should only talk about tracking if it is a real wave survey with at least two (better more) survey waves based on reasonably sufficient sample sizes.
In the Anglo-Saxon world - where the concept was invented - the content of an advertising tracking study is defined much more narrowly: it must be a continuous study with personal interviews, conducted at least at monthly or half-yearly intervals, but better still at weekly intervals, and the samples of which must in no case be less than 200 or 400 individuals or households. Larger samples are desirable, and it is now considered acceptable for the data to be collected by telephone survey.
Modest Swiss tracking models
More important than these formal features, however, is that the study does what it promises to do, namely that it tracks advertising campaigns over time and thereby brings to light useful results about the effect of the advertising media used. It thus collects indicators of advertising impact and examines their development over the course of an advertising campaign - hence the good old term campaign development study.
It's an excellent description of what tracking studies do. They examine the course of advertising campaigns to find out whether they achieve their communication goals and are worth the money. But in our Americanized world, it's simply no longer possible to put it in such Germanic terms.
In this narrow sense, there are very few tracking studies in Switzerland that really deserve the name. Yes, one can write without great exaggeration that Switzerland is a barren wasteland when it comes to advertising tracking. In Austria, a country of comparable size, there are a total of eight fully-fledged tracking studies with all the necessary trimmings. Some of them - such as the RollMA of the Linz Institute for Market and Social Analyses (Imas) - are so successful that they have been exported to Germany and - under a different name - also to Switzerland.
There are around 20 standardized tracking studies on offer in Germany. Some of them - such as RTL's Advertising Impact Compass, Sat 1's AdTrend study, the NIKO Advertising Index or the GfK Advertising Indicator/ATS - are among the most highly developed and sophisticated methods of global advertising tracking anywhere. In comparison, the models available in Switzerland look rather modest. Very modest, in fact.
AX Print and AX TV only survey trends
In fact, it is very difficult to say how many standardized tracking offers there are in Switzerland, because a whole series of studies call themselves such, but in reality are not advertising tracking studies at all. This is especially true of the continuous advertising tests that Demoscope offers under the names AX Print and AX TV as part of its Market Radar. The abbreviation AX stands for Advertising IndeX.
At best, the two individual studies, which test several hundred ads and TV spots per year at monthly intervals, can be described as a tracking of general advertising trends. They can be used to determine which types and forms of advertising particularly appeal to certain target groups and which new trends are emerging. But that's just something completely different from campaign-accompanying impact research in the form of wave surveys.
The Market Radar software makes it possible to read test results from your own advertising tests (Ad) into the test results of the advertising environment (from AX). In this way, a kind of benchmarking can be achieved. This makes it possible to see how well one's own advertising performs in comparison to the competition and in its target group, and how the competition is performing. All of this may be very useful. But it has very little to do with campaign-related impact research.
Tracking is often as expensive as a campaign
The Swiss advertising industry has to do without a larger selection of standardized tracking methods. This is a question of supply and demand. Swiss companies are generally of a completely different scale than international companies. The costs of continuous monitoring of advertising expenditure and advertising success in Switzerland are dangerously close to the level of national advertising campaigns themselves.
So it's hardly worth it, or only in the rarest of cases. Nevertheless, this is no explanation for the Swiss advertising industry's extensive tracking abstinence; because in comparison, Austria is a true tracking paradise.
Probably the best established model on the market is the Print Advertising Monitor (PAM), although it has only been around for a year. Tracking is still as young as a fresh spring day in Switzerland. After a pilot test in 1998, Publimedia, the key account company of Publicitas, launched the Print Advertising Monitor in the spring of 1999. With PAM, it offers its customers the opportunity to check whether advertising campaigns in print media are achieving their advertising goals.
Whether the PAM is a fully-fledged tracking study at all is a matter for considerable debate, although the point is absolutely clear: it is far too puny in its layout and design to merit the designation of advertising tracking. In fact, PAM is nothing more than a cross-title copy test for German-speaking Switzerland, documenting the transport performance of print campaigns. But at least it goes into the field on a monthly basis.
As indicators of advertising success, the Demoscope Institute uses a series of standard questions on advertising impact (aided recall, product interest and ad rating) on behalf of Publimedia and is also able to include additional questions on defined campaigns in the survey.
While numerous international tracking studies sometimes draw on ten or more indicators and thus draw from a large wealth of data, PAM makes do with just a few indicators. That is very modest.
The important thing is whether the scale with which you measure is correct
However, this should not be judged critically in principle. Whether a study has a single scale or many scales is basically immaterial. The only thing that matters is whether the scale (or scales) measures what it is supposed to measure. And if it does, it is even a requirement of parsimony - the principle of scientific proportionality between effort and yield - not to overload a study with the gigantic fuss of numerous measuring instruments that all end up measuring the same thing.
It's no secret that many tracking studies rely on ten or more indicators out of sheer ignorance. You don't know exactly how things are related to each other. So you choose a lot of indicators. One of them will measure something useful. And if not, then all of them together will certainly measure something useful. Research can be that primitive. In any case, the multitude of measurements will produce some kind of results that can be used to juggle and, above all, to trade. After all, market research has to sell itself...
PAM certainly cannot be accused of using too many indicators. There is no doubt that he takes the requirement of parsimony into account. But the result is also quite parsimonious. Since PAM has only been in existence for a year, impressive tracking experience cannot yet be reported. After all, Publimedia has now tested around 60 campaigns. The pool of impact data on campaigns in various markets is gradually growing.
In any case, PAM is primarily an instrument of generic marketing for print media. It provides publishers, agencies and advertising companies with arguments for the use of print media. That is also the only higher purpose of its existence.
Psychometer optimizes spots and their length
The AdTrack model of the Lucerne-based Link Institute for Market and Social Research is of a somewhat different caliber, but it too is content to measure a few parameters for testing advertising impact, namely spontaneous and aided advertising recall. This study, too, which has so far been used for a single client and is only just about to be opened up to other clients, can therefore by no means be accused of disregarding the principle of parsimony in the use of indicators.
An almost - but only almost - fully-fledged tracking model is the Psychometer of the Lucerne research institute Interdata, which, however, did not grow on Swiss soil. It emerged from the Austrian TV RollMA developed by the Imas Institute in Linz toward the end of the 1980s.
This in turn evolved from the RollMA. Since 1982, it has recorded the awareness presence of brands from a variety of product fields every two months, alternating with the Austrian Consumer Analysis (ÖVA). In 1988, this measurement procedure gave rise to the TV RollMA, the aim of which was to determine, in a detailed TV spot analysis, which characteristics and features have a positive impact on advertising impact and consumers' willingness to buy.
Today, the advanced study is known as Psychometer. The advertising industry owes it a series of groundbreaking findings on the optimum length of commercials and commercial breaks on television.
Like most econometric models of advertising effectiveness, the Psychometer is based on ideas from the psychology of learning: Consumers "learn" the content of advertising. The memory of what is learned diminishes over time if there is no reinforcement. The stronger the competition from other "learning material," the lower the "learning performance."
Theories about advertising pressure gather banalities
This explains the great importance that such studies assign to advertising pressure. Accordingly, the advertising impact depends on the advertising pressure exerted by an industry as a whole (external pressure) as well as the pressure exerted by the individual advertisers themselves (internal pressure). The conclusion from this is only seemingly logical and actually also falls behind well-worn clichés: if all competitors advertise a lot, you have to spend a lot of money to be heard at all in the general advertising din. In the much-cited advertising holes, on the other hand, namely in summer and winter, you have to spend much less money to make an impact.
But even the premise is questionable. The idea behind the "summer slump" in particular is that it is not worthwhile to advertise a lot because most of the target group is away. And if this assumption is correct, then the whole theory about large and not so large advertising pressure is for nothing.
So at least no one is surprised that the many fine theories about the sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker advertising pressure very rarely get beyond banalities: You can achieve much more with a lot of money than with little. But sometimes even a lot of money doesn't help if, for example, you have a big appetite for chocolate and go to an electronics store only to find out that you can't get chocolate there even for a lot of money. You have to direct your advertising communication very precisely at the target group if the investment is to be of any use. Unfortunately, this is not a matter of course in the age of TV advertising.
The communication monitor measures by channel
As an indicator of advertising success, Interdata has been measuring spontaneous and aided recall of a spot, its familiarity and recall of individual scenes based on storyboards as part of the Psychometer in Switzerland since 1992. To date, Interdata has tested just under 2,500 TV spots.
However, the psychometer is missing two essential elements for a tracking study: It is not a real wave survey with a sufficient sample size, but a pretest, a posttest or even a combination of both, depending on the customer's wishes. And only if a pretest and a posttest are used in combination with each other can the whole event be described as advertising tracking, if viewed in the most benevolent manner and with two eyes firmly closed.
Probably most astonishing of all is this: The large, all-powerful IHA-GfM Institute in Hergiswil, which is by far the largest market research institute in Switzerland with around 300 full-time employees and annual sales of almost 54 million Swiss francs, currently has just one, largely unknown standardized tracking study in its portfolio: the Communications Monitor. Little can be learned about it because the entire area of communications research at IHA-GfM is in a state of flux.
The question of branding is only asked at the end
One of the ways in which the Communication Monitor differs from other tracking systems is that it records all communication influences separately by channel - i.e. TV, print, posters, radio, cinema, Internet, events/sponsorship, direct mail, personal conversations, editorial contributions - and uses the chain of effects to record their influence on attitudes, liking, preference and more.
In doing so, it not only asks about perceived advertising, but only poses the question of branding at the end, in order to prevent the results from being distorted by notoriously well-known brands such as Coca-Cola. The monitor measures all the classic parameters of advertising impact and shows the correlations in the defined market between communication, attitudes, (brand) positioning and behavior.
Identical target persons must be able to be interviewed
In principle, any market research company that offers a multi-topic survey such as IHA-GfM's Interbus can of course also carry out tracking by including a series of campaign-related questions in this survey. But standardized tracking is something fundamentally different.
The decisive advantage - the cumulative gain of data over a large number of campaigns - cannot be offered by such multi-topic surveys used for tracking purposes.
However, with more than 20 retail and consumer panels alone, the IHA-GfM Institute offers a large number of studies that are often much more productive than some of the very crudely designed advertising tracking studies. The ideal instrument for observing and monitoring changes - including the effects of advertising - in market and media research is, after all, panels, i.e. samples of identical (and not merely similar) target persons who are always asked the same questions in several survey waves. The instrument is eminently suitable for identifying and analyzing changes in attitudes.
Insofar as surveys aim to ascertain the changes in attitudes brought about by the use of advertising, panels would in principle also be an excellent instrument for measuring them. However, they have the disadvantage of conditioning respondents so strongly through continuous exposure to the advertising messages under investigation that the overall results would be distorted.
Autumn promises tracking improvements
Nevertheless, the nebulous gloom over the Swiss tracking scene will be lifted a little this year. In the fall, IHA-GfM will launch the first major tracking study, the Swiss ATS (Advertising Tracking System),
which also meets international standards. It is an adaptation to the Swiss market of the GfK advertising indicator ATS developed by the German parent company - Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung (GfK) in Nuremberg.
GfK*ATS has been able to establish itself as an internationally applicable and constantly improved instrument in the German-speaking countries. Austrian Fessel-GfK is currently working on implementing this instrument in Central and Eastern Europe. The aim is to use a standard questionnaire, standardized and more precise analysis processes and a harmonized reporting system.
The Swiss ATS also relies on the classic variables of advertising tracking such as advertising and brand awareness, advertising recall, slogan awareness and
-association, use, purchase and brand images. Compared to other models, however, it is characterized by a stronger consideration of advertising-specific elements over brand-relevant aspects. In this way, Swiss ATS aims to take account of the strong importance of advertising for the success of the brand.
Continuity of tracking with monthly survey waves, if possible, is important; because meaningful results can only be achieved with a sufficient number of measurement points. Approaches such as data agglomeration from smaller, rolling samples or pooling concepts, i.e. the integration of several product categories into one survey wave, help to reduce the costs of continuous advertising tracking.
Lack of tracking studies is not a disaster
Sophisticated and highly differentiated tracking instruments, which are based on complex theories of advertising impact and have been permanently optimized over the course of many years, are practically non-existent in Switzerland. Studies such as IP Deutschland's Advertising Impact Compass (WWK), Sat 1's AdTrend or even the Niko Advertising Index are not yet to be found in this country. And it doesn't seem as if this should change much in the next few years.
This is perhaps not a big catastrophe, because in most tracking studies, effort and performance are somehow blatantly disproportionate. Huge mountains of data are always scrambled to produce nothing but insignificant mice of knowledge. There is no doubt that Switzerland is a leader when it comes to tracking.
a single research desert. But this desert is also an island of the blessed, because it spares the Swiss advertising industry a lot of survey hullabaloo that sometimes yields little and sometimes nothing at all that makes sense.
Advertising tracking in Switzerland
With this article, WerbeWoche continues the multi-part series of articles by trade journalist Wolfgang J. Koschnick on advertising tracking in Switzerland. The article following this part on the situation in Switzerland looks at some of the most developed international tracking models, presents the state of the art in tracking research, and examines the question of whether the Swiss advertising industry could not gain considerable insights into the effect of advertising over the course of a campaign by introducing a proper, sophisticated tracking study.
