For years, when assessing outcomes from surveys about advertising effectiveness, researchers have debated the validity of multiple measures of attitudes (preferred by academics) vs. single-item measures (preferred by practitioners). To measure attitudes toward an advertisement, for example, academic researchers often use items such as, “The ad is good/bad”; “The ad is informative”; “The ad is pleasant/unpleasant”; and “I like/dislike the ad.”
By contrast, practitioners often use only one item, such as, “I like/dislike the ad,” because they are concerned less with internal reliability and more with the managerial value of the study. Their approach can allow them to shorten their surveys.
In the current era of ever-decreasing survey response rates and respondents’ attention spans, this study claims to bring good news for advertising research, by validating the practitioners’ method of simpler, less costly single-item measurement. Among the takeaways: