As the Super Bowl approaches in a few weeks, there will be many people getting excited... not about the game... but rather for the commercials!  Most of you would probably agree that the TV spots viewed during the game can be some of the most entertaining ads seen throughout the year.  However, do you remember those ads a few weeks afterwards or even know who they were for?

Whether advertising is used on a grand scale (i.e. Super Bowl) or rather on a much smaller scale (i.e. local print ad), the understanding of the impact of your advertising remains important.  Based on years of measuring advertising impact, below are some key guiding principles to maximize the impact of your ads.

1.  Does Your Ad Drive Awareness?  Does the audience for which your ad is targeted know and remember your ad?  People are inundated with messages daily.  Finding ways to make your ads unique and to break through the clutter of all other messages that your audience is exposed to will position you for greater success.

2.  Can Your Audience Link the Ad to Your Company/Brand?  Having your audience remember your ad is obviously important, but this does not mean much unless the audience can attribute it back to your company/brand.  In other words, this situation represents a lost opportunity.  Being unable to remember the company/brand for which an ad is created is a very common problem when measuring the impact of advertising.  In fact, more than half of all ads typically cannot be attributed back to the proper company/brand.  Ensuring that your company/brand is clearly communicated is critical in setting your ad up for maximum impact.

3.  Is Your Audience Taking Away the Proper Message?  Awareness and proper attribution set you up for success, but you also need the audience to take away the proper message that you want to convey.  This is another very common problem when the impact of advertising is measured... often the intended message would be relevant to your audience, but it gets lost in the advertising due to trying to communicate too much.  Make sure that you create a clear, concise message.

4.  Is Your Ad Generating Demand?  Effective ads are known/remembered by the audience, attributed to your company/brand, and communicated in a clear, concise way.  Making the ad and its message relevant will maximize your success. A key metric in advertising impact analysis is whether or not the ad was able to tell the audience something new/different that they did not already know about your company/brand.  Ads that convey relevant, new information drive success.

The measurement of advertising impact can run from very sophisticated methods costing a significant amount of money to more rudimentary methods which could potentially cost very little.  These methods can be executed prior to running the ad to predict the likelihood of success as well as after the ad has run to measure actual success.  Further discussion of these methods will be included in the upcoming issue of NSGA's magazine to be sent in early February.

Quick Feedback Question:

How successful do you think your company is at developing impactful advertising?  Please click on your answer below and overall results will be shared in next month's newsletter.

A. Very Successful

B. Moderately Successful

C. Not Successful

D. Don't Know

E. We Don't Advertise

For further discussion please feel free to contact Dustin Dobrin, NSGA Director of Research & Information, at (847) 296-6742, ext. 1170 or ddobrin@nsga.org.

Last month NSGA and Leisure Trends Group jointly announced a strategic partnership that will provide NSGA's members with free access to sporting goods point-of-sale (POS) retail data.  Specifically, NSGA members will be able to access topline Sporting Goods RetailTRAK reports, providing valuable insight into sales performance for the athletic footwear, apparel, and accessories categories.  Additionally, NSGA members will have the ability to purchase detailed Brand Share reports from Leisure Trends Group that will provide an even deeper view of sporting goods performance.

NSGA is very excited to provide access to this data because it has been a key request by its members.  Having access to POS data can be beneficial for a variety of reasons, including the following:

     - To gain valuable insight into product categories / brands / models that are growing vs. declining

     - To guide decisions as to the products that should be stocked in your store

     - To identify newer and upcoming categories / brands / models that are growing rapidly

     - To benchmark your sales vs. the rest of the industry to identify opportunity areas       

Additionally, in the near future NSGA will begin to provide its members POS Sporting Goods Category "Snapshots" to make it easy for you to digest and interpret the data/trends.

For members looking to gain access to this highly valuable information, please contact Dustin Dobrin, NSGA Director of Research & Information, at (847) 296-6742, ext. 1170 or ddobrin@nsga.org.