Why did Starch Advertising Research conduct an ad adjacency analysis?
A. Let me be up front: We don’t have all the answers.” There are no hard and fast rules; a killer creative execution can change everything. But we are in a really good position to offer some fact-based guidance on which ad positions seem to work better than others, particularly because our analysis is probably the largest of its kind. Q. How was the analysis done? A. This analysis was about ad adjacency only — not other forms of ad positioning. We literally hand-catalogued the nearly 68,000 ads Starch measured from January ’09 to June ’10 — across 1,884 magazine issues — according to their adjacencies. For instance, was the ad next to another ad, next to the cover story, next to an article or next to a relevant article? By the way, we define “relevant article” as being about the same subject as an adjacent ad. Q. Is this a one-time study, or does Starch intend to carry out another analysis or even make it a regular service)? A. This Ad Adjacency information is now in the Starch data
