Early in the last century, department store scion John Wanamaker lamented that “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.” Today, he might be even more pessimistic about the impact of his ad dollars. While every CMO hopes great creative will allow their brand’s story to clearly reach both users and non-users, it has become increasingly difficult to break through the clutter and noise of the myriad messages received by consumers every day. This challenge is only compounded by today’s tighter marketing budgets and bottom-line focus, which requires that every advertising expenditure be directly tied to incremental volume. The old method of setting advertising budgets by simple sales ratios is no longer acceptable. CMOs require that their advertising investments deliver quantifiable results not only by increasing brand awareness but by actually holding or growing share of market. Moreover, senior marketing executives want these results achieved with greater efficiency than ever before.

It has often been theorized that an ad that provides an opportunity to actually experience a brand’s attributes would be more motivating than one that allows a consumer to just read about what a product does. According to this theory, these experiential campaigns – ads that create sense memories – should generate greater sales than ads alone. In other words, because these ads allow consumers to interact with products at the same time that they receive the ad message, a more indelible memory is made and this leads to greater purchase intent. Trying to quantify this effect, however, has proven elusive.

Now a new research study conducted by Massachusetts-based consulting firm FromTopDown in partnership with research firms Millward Brown and The Greenfield Group, documents that advertising accompanied by a sensory product experience generates not only greater brand awareness, overall brand ratings and purchase intent, but actually generates incremental sales with a positive profit return on the advertising investment.

In 2009, of the 73,000 8^th graders in 283 school districts in Massachusetts taking the math MCAS, only 49% passed with a score of proficient or advanced.  23% failed outright and another 28% needed to make specific improvements to attain the necessary level of proficiency for their grade.  In 45% of Massachusetts schools districts half of the 8^th graders could not successfully pass the MCAS. That translates  in raw numbers to 37,000 8^th grade students.  Most will move on to high school next year.

Although this lack of proficiency by half of Massachusetts’s graduating 8^th graders may seem shocking to those outside of the educational industrial complex,   what was even more surprising is that Massachusetts students are more proficient in mathematics than students in all other states as scored by a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) .

The publically available data demonstrates how much the education system is failing the children and parents of the country.  In one of the most educationally progressive states in the country 50% of the math students are not performing at their grade level.  This is in spite of a $12.3 billion dollar annual state education budget for grades K-12 which equates to nearly $12,500 per student per year.  $8.9 billion of which pays the salary for 138,000 teachers.

Thank you for taking the time to visit the FromTopDown Blog.

Over the past year we have been researching and collecting information on market research, US economic data, product experience marketing, and the reforms taking place in public education.  We hope to provide a series of articles and threads that will provide information and opinion that can be used to inspire some debate and conversation.

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