When Measuring an Ad’s Success, Less is More

Summary

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:

• Studies that use single-item measures do not differ in effect size from those that use multiple-item measures.
• The number of items used to measure attitudes does not influence the effect of the independent variables on attitudes.
• If a construct has a clear and singular meaning and the object being rated also is clear and identifiable, then a single valid item is all that is needed.
• Data collection is more efficient and less tedious with the single item approach.
• The study’s results strongly suggest that the findings may be broadly applicable.