How to save costs on TV advertising with ad testing

The key to a a great ad is great creatives, and ad testing is the tool that ensures your ads are both relevant and effective.

Google reports that 70% of an ad’s impact comes from creativity (what’s in your ad), while only 30% comes from targeting (who sees it). To put it in a financial context, the best creatives generate 11 times higher profits than mediocre ones.

By testing your TV ads before production, you can avoid wasting resources on content that doesn’t resonate, and instead focus your budget on ads that drive results.

We'll help you take some of the guesswork out of TV advertising costs with our comprehensive guide. You'll learn about the practical benefits of ad testing, how to run tests, and how to avoid common pitfalls when navigating your advertising budget.

What makes a TV ad effective?

Overwhelmed by options, where the average supermarket offers 45,000 items, our buying decisions are rarely rational.

Instead, 95% of these choices are subconscious—meaning the brand with the fastest memory linkage wins. The most effective creatives are those that build these quick, lasting associations.

Creating a super-effective ad involves three critical components: brand, need, and emotion.

As the saying goes, “neurons that fire together, wire together,” and emotions intensify these connections. In an effective ad, the brand and need should be prominently displayed together (the longer, the better) and paired with a strong emotional response.

Even the most professionally produced TV commercial won’t get far if it doesn’t resonate with its audience. This is where TV ad testing comes in, helping ensure your ad strikes the right chord with the right people.

The 5 top benefits of ad testing

It's not enough to make an educated guess and launch your TV ad out into the world. Ad testing provides you with first-hand knowledge straight from your target audience so you can craft ads with clear messages, strong emotions, and recognizable branding.

So, here are the top 5 benefits of TV ad testing:

• Improve the effectiveness of your TV ad by gaining insights into how people perceive your advertising. This allows you to make adjustments that create the desired impact on viewers, ultimately maximizing the impact on your business.
• Reduce the amount of money lost by investing your media budget only in the highest-performing ad variants. This ensures your ads achieve the impact you’re aiming for.
• Save your marketing team time by avoiding rework on ads that won’t perform, allowing you to focus on effective strategies for future campaigns.
• Have peace of mind during ad production by receiving targeted, relevant feedback for improvements—no more guesswork.
• Confidently choose the best campaign concept when evaluating multiple options. Select the variant with the greatest potential to resonate with your audience and deliver the best results.

The only real cons of TV advertising tests is narrowing down the best tool for the job (which we're more than happy to help you with below).

How to use ad testing for your upcoming marketing campaign

Whether you're interested in local TV advertising or want to try national TV advertising, you need to know how to test your ads effectively.

At Behavio, we offer businesses an ad testing platform that enables them to test their ads for TV networks while staying within their marketing budget.

Before you start looking at your advertising cost on TV, let's start from the top with testing:

Figure out your goal

The goal of ad testing is, of course, to ensure that your campaign will perform well. However, “performing well” can mean different things depending on your ad objectives: Are you aiming to build brand awareness? Drive sales of a new product? Or increase event sign-ups?

You should also clarify the key messages you want to convey in your campaign. Is it that your product is more affordable than competitors, made with recyclable materials, or designed to solve a unique problem that others don’t address?

By answering these questions upfront, you'll be in a much better spot to pull valuable insights from your ad testing process.

Narrow down your target audience

Who are you trying to advertise to and why? Segmenting your target audience may take a little time and research, but it'll allow you to deliver a more personalized and resonant message to the viewer.

You can narrow down your target audience on a variety of details, such as:

• Age
• Income
• Location
• Interests
• Education
• Job roles

You might also consider whether they’re a category buyer—people who already purchase products like yours, such as U.S. consumers who buy orange juice at least a few times a year. Category buyers are already in the market for products or services like yours, making them more likely to engage with your brand.

Find a small segment of your audience

Once you know who your ideal audience is, you need to start doing some outreach to find a few people in that audience willing to help you out.

One way to reach out to your audience is via your active marketing channels, such as your email newsletter or social media.

If you want to save time here, ad testing tools like Behavio allow you to select your target audience and track their reactions to your campaigns.

This way, you can quickly understand what resonates with them—gauging metrics like brand, need, and emotion without the need for extensive outreach on your side.

Show your audience variants on TV ads

To get a more well-rounded perspective on your TV advertisement, show your audience multiple versions. Similar to A/B testing for email marketing, this approach allows you to fine-tune the details of your ad.

For instance, you might have one version of a cable TV ad that’s five seconds longer than another. With ad testing, you can show both versions to a sample audience to determine the ideal ad length for broadcast TV.

Evaluate which message resonates best

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make in TV advertising is trying to communicate too many messages at once. Research shows that the more points an ad attempts to convey, the less likely any single message will stick.

Ad testing can help here too by revealing which single, clear message resonates best. For instance, if you’re promoting a health beverage, you might test one ad focusing on antioxidant properties and another on high fiber content.

The results of your ad testing will reveal which message works best for your audience, maximizing recall and ensuring your message stays impactful.

Ask your audience their thoughts to get deeper insight

This step is the meat of ad testing and vital for a well-researched TV advertising campaign. Testing your TV ad typically involves gathering feedback from your audience with clear and neutral questions, such as:

• What is the main message of this TV ad?
• What did you like?
• What did you not like?
• What would you improve about this TV ad?

However, it's important to remember that what people say doesn't always reflect what they do.

That's where Behavio’s methodology stands out from traditional ad testing. We use advanced behavioral science to track how subconscious memory shifts, helping us predict what actually drives people to buy.

That said, hearing direct feedback is still valuable. That's why our dashboard includes verbatim quotes from your audience, giving you a clear window into their thoughts throughout the entire TV commercial.

Conduct tests before, during, and after you launch your TV ads

Ad testing isn't just a one-and-done endeavor. You'll get the most useful information for your national or local TV advertising costs by testing throughout the entire production process.

You can test everything from storyboards to other elements of pre-production before the final shooting. This fine attention to detail is what leads to better ad creatives and ensures you're saving money, not losing it.

After that, you can continue to save on your TV commercial cost by testing your ad again once it's launched. For example, regular ad testing after launch could reveal that your TV ad became less effective a few weeks later due to a new industry trend.

By continuing to test your ad post-launch, you'll get essential information to tweak your ad before it starts losing your business money.

How does ad testing affect costs?

How much does it cost to run ads without testing? While the exact number will depend on your tests and market research, you'll definitely save more with it than without it.

According to a study by LG Ads, brands push up to 50% of their TV marketing budget to capture just 10% of an available audience. This disparity could be caused by poor production costs or simply targeting the wrong people.

With ad testing, you avoid common pitfalls such as poor targeting or inconsistent messaging and make it easier to reduce your production costs. The cost of TV advertising will be lower when you've already proven your impact with people out in the real world.

What could you achieve by saving more money on your TV advertising campaigns? You can find out for yourself when you start ad testing with Behavio.

Behavio makes it easy to create memorable TV ads (at a fraction of the cost)

You need to test your TV ads, but you also need to save money. We understand and respect this conundrum — it's why we created an affordable, rock-solid ad testing platform.

We help businesses run tests for global and local TV ads without wasting time on campaigns that just don't click.

Our practical dashboard lays out all the essential tools of ad testing right at your fingertips with useful audience insights, variant testing, and handy editing features. You can tweak your TV ads in response to feedback or share early drafts: whatever you need to get a clear picture.

Our average turnaround time of five days ensures you'll get the information you need for your TV ads swiftly, inching you closer to that one-of-a-kind ad that knocks your goals out of the park.

Even if you end up going with a different form of television advertising or decide you'd rather switch to social media advertising, ad testing eliminates the guesswork in favor of informed decisions.

Not sure if you're ready to commit to Behavio for your upcoming TV ads? Try our demo and see for yourself!