netrashetty
Netra Shetty
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a privately held software company in the telecommunication industry, headquartered in Orange County, California. It specializes in developing business-level communications solutions focusing on medium to large enterprise, government, higher education and healthcare markets.[1][2][3]
The company is known for its primary product, a speech-enabled unified communications platform, called CallXpress. It includes advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification capabilities. AVST is one of the few switch independent developers of unified messaging/unified communications solutions.[4]
Dissimilar audience measures: Traffic by the site is good to know, but how many of those people actually notice your billboard? How does the value of a million people driving by your billboard compare to the value of a million people sitting in front a TV set while your commercial is playing? We know it is different, but how different? And as everyone is aware, the accuracy with which the industry measures either audience is open to some debate.
Overlap: A second advertising medium makes a lot more sense, and is a lot more valuable, if it reaches people who were not reached by the first medium. The readily available audience data doesn’t tell you anything about how much of what you are buying is duplicated overlap and how much is new and un-reached.
Inaccurate measures of reach and affect: Those who take the first two blind spots seriously will usually turn to tracking studies, which are custom studies to determine the number reached and affected by the advertising they are conducting. But what kind of study? Recall-based telephone trackers are still the most popular. But we found when you ask if people recall any of your recent advertising, and they say yes, they may well be thinking of advertising you conducted last year, or they could even be thinking of your competitor’s advertising. But when you show them the advertising and ask, “Do you remember seeing THIS before?” you get a massive increase in accuracy.2 Added to that was a situation that may be unique to firms in Starbucks’ situation. The Starbucks brand is so large in this country, and the coffee shops are so widespread, people expect Starbucks to advertise, and we find substantial numbers saying they recall Starbucks advertising during periods when there has not been any.
Online study
The tracking study conducted by Bruzzone Research was designed to measure the effect of Starbucks advertising during the summer of 2002. The Starbucks name had not been closely associated with summertime drinks. One of the objectives of the summer advertising was to change that.
It was done with a before-and-after study conducted online. The online population was getting close to matching the total population, but still with somewhat of a younger, more upscale skew. That made it a good fit for most Starbucks products. Doing it online enabled us to show each respondent virtually every piece of advertising Starbucks used over the summer. We did it as illustrated in Figure 1. A total of 24 items were shown in the same manner. A feeling for the other items in the campaign is provided by Figures 2 and 3. For the radio commercials respondents clicked on a speaker symbol to hear an excerpt. When respondents recognized any of the ads they were asked additional questions. More about that in a moment. But first, how do we use that recognition data?
Recognition is what tells us if a respondent noticed an advertisement. We use that to see if those who noticed a particular advertisement showed higher levels of awareness, favorable impressions and buying behavior. But we needed to avoid that classic problem of post-only studies. People who always had more favorable reactions are the most likely to notice the advertising. So we surveyed almost 800 individuals across the country both before and after the advertising. That met the need to see if an actual change had taken place among those who noticed an advertisement. However, that first interview can sensitize people and make them more likely to notice that brand’s advertising in the future. So we also surveyed another 800 after the advertising who had never been interviewed before. It was the results from this control group that were used to determine how much change had taken place overall in awareness, perceptions and behavior. In short, we used full experimental design to get the most conclusive evidence possible.
As for response rates, 1,453 of the first-wave respondents were invited to participate in the second wave and 53 percent did. Another 4,708 invitations were sent to a cross-section of the online population drawn from Survey Sampling’s SurveySpot panel. Eighteen percent completed the survey, providing 851 replies from people who had not been surveyed before. The response rate was well within the range normally encountered in this type of online research. Validation of this approach is included in the references describing the four years of parallel studies Bruzzone Research conducted in its annual testing of all Super Bowl commercials.3
The company is known for its primary product, a speech-enabled unified communications platform, called CallXpress. It includes advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification capabilities. AVST is one of the few switch independent developers of unified messaging/unified communications solutions.[4]
Dissimilar audience measures: Traffic by the site is good to know, but how many of those people actually notice your billboard? How does the value of a million people driving by your billboard compare to the value of a million people sitting in front a TV set while your commercial is playing? We know it is different, but how different? And as everyone is aware, the accuracy with which the industry measures either audience is open to some debate.
Overlap: A second advertising medium makes a lot more sense, and is a lot more valuable, if it reaches people who were not reached by the first medium. The readily available audience data doesn’t tell you anything about how much of what you are buying is duplicated overlap and how much is new and un-reached.
Inaccurate measures of reach and affect: Those who take the first two blind spots seriously will usually turn to tracking studies, which are custom studies to determine the number reached and affected by the advertising they are conducting. But what kind of study? Recall-based telephone trackers are still the most popular. But we found when you ask if people recall any of your recent advertising, and they say yes, they may well be thinking of advertising you conducted last year, or they could even be thinking of your competitor’s advertising. But when you show them the advertising and ask, “Do you remember seeing THIS before?” you get a massive increase in accuracy.2 Added to that was a situation that may be unique to firms in Starbucks’ situation. The Starbucks brand is so large in this country, and the coffee shops are so widespread, people expect Starbucks to advertise, and we find substantial numbers saying they recall Starbucks advertising during periods when there has not been any.
Online study
The tracking study conducted by Bruzzone Research was designed to measure the effect of Starbucks advertising during the summer of 2002. The Starbucks name had not been closely associated with summertime drinks. One of the objectives of the summer advertising was to change that.
It was done with a before-and-after study conducted online. The online population was getting close to matching the total population, but still with somewhat of a younger, more upscale skew. That made it a good fit for most Starbucks products. Doing it online enabled us to show each respondent virtually every piece of advertising Starbucks used over the summer. We did it as illustrated in Figure 1. A total of 24 items were shown in the same manner. A feeling for the other items in the campaign is provided by Figures 2 and 3. For the radio commercials respondents clicked on a speaker symbol to hear an excerpt. When respondents recognized any of the ads they were asked additional questions. More about that in a moment. But first, how do we use that recognition data?
Recognition is what tells us if a respondent noticed an advertisement. We use that to see if those who noticed a particular advertisement showed higher levels of awareness, favorable impressions and buying behavior. But we needed to avoid that classic problem of post-only studies. People who always had more favorable reactions are the most likely to notice the advertising. So we surveyed almost 800 individuals across the country both before and after the advertising. That met the need to see if an actual change had taken place among those who noticed an advertisement. However, that first interview can sensitize people and make them more likely to notice that brand’s advertising in the future. So we also surveyed another 800 after the advertising who had never been interviewed before. It was the results from this control group that were used to determine how much change had taken place overall in awareness, perceptions and behavior. In short, we used full experimental design to get the most conclusive evidence possible.
As for response rates, 1,453 of the first-wave respondents were invited to participate in the second wave and 53 percent did. Another 4,708 invitations were sent to a cross-section of the online population drawn from Survey Sampling’s SurveySpot panel. Eighteen percent completed the survey, providing 851 replies from people who had not been surveyed before. The response rate was well within the range normally encountered in this type of online research. Validation of this approach is included in the references describing the four years of parallel studies Bruzzone Research conducted in its annual testing of all Super Bowl commercials.3