ABSTRACT
Uncertainty about the true advertising effectiveness of television commercials is reflected in the variety of techniques purporting to measure it. These techniques include experimental-and-control group, before-and-after, and experimental-only designs. They encompass tests in mobile trailer, movie theater, and on-the-air situations. They deal with data on immediate retention, next-day recall, brand attitudes, and opinions about the uniqueness, importance, or credibility of copy points. They all provide helpful information. However, they do not tell us as much as we would like to know about the processes of copy impact. It is suggested that other equally useful techniques for evaluating TV copy may develop from an orientation which is not initially evaluative in purpose but which seeks instead to explore the usefulness of a particular theoretical approach for understanding those processes better.
