Media Effectiveness: The CEP™ Test

The CEP™ Test was designed with Dr Robert Heath, author of The Hidden Power of Advertising. It offers an extremely effective way of evaluating trails and ads by assessing their ability to engage and/or inform.

In his paper, "How Do We Predict Attention And Engagement?" at the 2007 ARF Conference in New York, Heath made the case that:

• Engagement: The amount of subconscious ‘feeling’ going on when an advertisement is being processed
• Attention: The amount of conscious ‘thinking’ going on when an advertisement is being processed

Heath demonstrated in his paper that an ad’s “potential for engagement and attention may be predicted by measuring the levels of emotional and rational content in advertising”. Namely, using the CEP™ Test to evaluate the Emotive Power of an ad as a measure of engagement; and evaluating the Cognitive Power to understand how much active attention (in terms of using cognitive resource to think about it) is being paid to it.

The validated CEP™ Test produces a score for Emotive Power and Cognitive Power from which the results are plotted on the CEP™ grid and can be compared against benchmarks. 

The CEP™ Test is a great way to measure effectiveness against the creative objectives and highlight areas for improvement. It will identify if the trail/ad has the potential to:

• Connect with or move someone – does it engage and build the brand?
• Grab attention through clearly imparting information/rational messages
• Do both! – working on both a conscious and subconscious level
• Do neither and needs to be improved.

The CEP™ test can be added into any campaign test to form a key measure upon which to assess trails/ads alongside more traditional measures (e.g. awareness, favourability, impressions of the creative, likes/dislikes, message take-out). It can also be built into the Content Monitor.