Progressive Iteration
A Development Program
By Seth L. Ginsburg

A. Philosophy

Progressive Iteration insures that strategies and executions are fully exposed to consumers before advertisers have to commit substantial financial resources to a particular creative direction. In a sense, Progressive Iteration allows advertisers to develop their communications in the same way that Vaudevillians of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries developed their stage acts.

In the Vaudeville era, a new act could not simply write some material and immediately go to New York to play the Palace. Vaudeville acts would go “on the road” to develop their material. As they progressed, they would improve their acts by trying out various bits in each city on the circuit – developing the promising ones and discarding the routines that didn’t work. By the time that they had played Peoria, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, they knew they had a good act. They were ready for Broadway.

In the same way, the “Progressive Iteration” procedure allows advertisers to try out their ideas in rough form and, by constant editing, finish with a product that has been thuroughly validated and found to be successful. Therefore, it is “progressive” in that the creative material continues to develop and improve throughout the progress, and “iterative” in that it goes through a series of iterations between exposure to consumers and evaluation/alteration by the product team.

B. Ingredients

To conduct a Progressive Iteration project, it is necessary to have:

A Good Project Team

To insure that all perspectives are taken into account, a Progressive Iteration project begins by assembling a project team. This team – a subset of the entire product group – will be empowered to make necessary changes in the strategic and/or creative ideas and function as a cohesive group; meeting frequently throughout the project. To as great a degree as possible, the entire team should be present for each step of the process.

The project team should include an independent moderator and representatives of:

•Brand Management
•Client Research
•Agency Account Management
•Agency Research & Planning
•Agency Creative

An Openness To Change

While client and/or agency personnel too often enter creative projects with strongly held prejudices, such preconceptions are inimical to a developmental project. Every member of the project team must be open to change.

A Commitment to the Process

Advertising development research is a highly demanding undertaking. While the creatives are the folks who are going to be assigned with the yeomanly task of bidding farewell to personally favored options and working to enhance preferred presentations, the rest of the the project group needs to stay involved – interpreting consumer judgments and adding their analysis to the process.

C. Methodology

Copy and strategic development research is always a qualitative process – the flexibility and open-ended character of qualitative research is essential if one is to use research to to explore consumers’ perceptions. Of all the research options, only qualitative approaches create situations where respondents can explore their evaluations and provide suggestions that may be useful to the creatives.

In a Progressive Iteration project, you will want to use:

IDI’s

Individual interviews permit a large degree of intimacy (essential if the product/service to be marketed is of a personal nature) and provide an important perspective – as direct mail pieces, online, print and TV commercials are frequently seen in individual viewing situations.

If possible (scheduling can be difficult) conduct a series of 2 to 5 IDI’s each lasting 30 to 45 minutes (depending on how many alternatives you want them to evaluate) in each day of research to get a variety of individual perspectives.

Focus Groups

In focus groups, individual opinions are subjected to peer review. As such, focus groups allow us to put to the test hypotheses generated in the IDI’s.

In order to include as many groups as possible, I recommend that you conduct groups that consist of 6 to 8 respondents and last for one and a half hours.

D. Materials

The kind of materials that you use will be predicated on the kind of developmental project that you are conducting.

For Strategic Development

One of the key uses of Progressive Iteration is to develop communication strategies. In such an instance, the objective of the project is to start with a wide range of strategic options and pare down potential strategies into a set of viable positioning statements.

Concept Statements

Traditionally, strategic development projects begin with statements written on individual pieces of paper that are distributed to respondents in a randomized order. While at the very earliest steps of a strategic development process, marketers often use statements consisting of a sentence or a phrase, you will probably want to use concept statements that include:

• A Main Idea – a single statement or phrase that conveys a central concept.

• Supporting Points – a couple of independent statements that support the central concept – generally giving respondents “reasons to believe.”

In this way, you will be able to understand the appeal of the key concept while understanding how to support that concept.

“Ad-like Objects”

In general, I prefer to use what are commonly referred to as “Ad-like Objects” –concept statements (usually with a main idea and supporting points) presented in the context of rough single-image print ads. While the addition of some sort of drawing is not strictly necessary – as the respondents will be instructed to focus on the ideas, not the art of the presentation – I have found that most consumers feel more comfortable discussing something that looks like advertising.

Please note, however, that all attempts should be made to insure that the drawings or pictures that accompany the key concepts are not so elaborate that they draw attention away from the concepts.

For Creative Development

While, in situations where you are developing print advertising, you will use rough print ads as the materials that you will present to respondents, in situations where you are developing TV advertising, you have a variety of materials at your disposal, including:

Storyboards

For my nickel, the best way of representing creative directions in developmental research is to present storyboards of individual executions to consumers in IDI’s and focus groups. Storyboards:

• Are relatively inexpensive – Creatives need only to draw pictures on cardboard. There is no need for films or animators.

• Effectively convey ideas – People are used to looking at comic strips and they understand them.

• Can be altered – While reediting a film can be a lot of work, redrawing a frame or two in a storyboard is relatively simple and easy.

• Can be used to explore Direct Marketing, TV and print ads.

There are two kinds of storyboards – ‘key visual’ storyboards and ‘comic strip’ storyboards.

• Key Visual story boards are single frames – often line drawings – with a central image chosen to represent key characters and/or key moments in the narrative of the spot.

- These kinds of storyboards are often used during the first steps of the creative development process – when the product group is trying to work through a variety of creative ideas. It is simpler for an art director to draw a single central image than it is to craft an entire comic strip storyboard.

• Comic Strip story boards are constructed of sequential panels portraying key visual developments of the execution – like comic strips.

- Comic strip storyboards are useful later in the development process – when the product group has settled on a small set of viable creative directions. Because these storyboards convey more information, they will do a more complete job in presenting an idea for a spot.

Animatics

Animatics are essentially an animated version of the storyboards. They can be very useful as a mid point between a storyboard and a finished execution. As was the case with storyboards, they effectively convey ideas (who hasn’t seen a cartoon?).

Still, animatics can not be easily (or inexpensively) altered during the course of a development project and, while putting together an animatic is less expensive than a finished execution, they are not cheap.

You should consider undertaking the expense of animatics only if you have already narrowed your focus. For example: you could consider the use of animatics in the second of two studies – when you have used the first study to sort through a number of options. Only after you are able to arrive at a couple of viable creative options, should you consider making them into animatics.

Ripomatics

Ripomatics – edited footage “ripped” from already existing sources – have become more popular in recent years. It is a very vivid way of presenting creative ideas as it looks just like a ‘real’ commercial.

However, like animatics, they are relatively expensive and difficult to alter during the course of an advertising development project. Therefore, as was the case with animatics, you should consider undertaking the expense of ripomatics only if you have already narrowed your focus in the first of two studies.

In addition, because ripomatics look so much like finished executions, respondents sometimes have difficulty getting past their overall experience of the spot to make suggestions for changes that would benefit the effectiveness of the execution.

E. Design

A Progressive Iteration project involve two steps:

• First, you will want to sort through a large collection of ideas in order to find a few strategic or creative ideas that show promise in effectively communicating to consumers.

• Next you will want to work with this smaller collection of ideas in order to both a) choose one or two candidates to take further and b) modify these options to enhance their appeal.

Number of Studies

Depending on where you are with the creative process, these steps can either be undertaken in one or two studies.

• If you are in a position where you are starting from scratch – for example, if you are creating a strategy for a new brand or a line extension – you will want to include as many distinctive concepts as possible in your initial stage of exploration. It might therefore be useful to conduct 2 studies – one study designed to cull the strategic concepts for the ones that show some promise and a second study to choose the best ideas and develop them as creative ideas.

- In the initial study, you will want to use a series of concept statements or single frame storyboards as stimuli.

- In the second study, you can move to adl-like presentations or comic strip storyboards.


• If, however, you have arrived at 3 to 5 strategic or creative ideas with which you are comfortable – a situation that is likely to occur when you are working on a new campaign for an established brand – you will be able to get away with conducting a single development study. While the first step will still be to cull some options – resulting in one to three preferred approaches – such a project will be designed primarily to refine the most viable options and choosing a preferred creative strategy.

- In this instance you will probably want to use comic strip storyboards as stimuli.

Components

Whether you decide to do two studies or one, any Progressive Iteration study includes two equally important components:

Research Sessions

During research sessions, you will present creative or strategic ideas to respondents and explore their reactions.

Evaluation/Modification Sessions

After each research session, the project team will meet to discuss the results of the session and make recommendations for any necessary changes in the creative directions.

In general, the sessions that follow the IDI’s will suggest only minor changes, while the team may make more extensive changes after meeting to discuss a day of IDI’s and focus groups.

If it is decided that large scale modifications are needed, the chosen project group member (usually creatives in the case of creative development projects) will have a day to make these changes.

Procedure

As such, a Progressive Iteration study is laid out, over several days, as a cycle of research and evaluation . Such a design will insure that the product group:

• Gets the chance to expose as broad an array of ideas as possible to a substantial number of consumer perspectives.

• Has the opportunity to think about respondent observations and to make appropriate modifications in the strategic or creative idea.

• Exposes modified ideas to more consumers and judge the efficacy of its modifications.

A typical project would look like:

As indicated above, a typical Progressive Iteration study takes place over four days – although, if necessary, the process can be extended until the team feels reasonably certain that they have one or more viable directions. In situations where you are conducting two studies, the results from Day 4 of the first study will serve as the basis for creating material to be explored on the first day of the second project.

H. Results

The end product of a Progressive Iteration project will be a small set of strategic concepts with supporting points or storyboards that are well regarded by both the project team and relevant consumers.

Often, the results of such a project will identify a single most viable direction. In this case – when a creative strategy has received unambiguous support – it will be possible to go directly into production; conducting a quantitative copy test only if account or brand representatives need numerical conformation – often in the service of political considerations.

Sometimes there will be more than one “winning” direction. In this case, it will be possible to perform an additional – quantitative – strategic test or copy test to decide between two or three options that have received support from respondents in the now completed Progressive Iteration project – knowing that all of the tested alternatives possess some level of viability.