A SENSE OF VISION - IV. PRE-TESTING BECOMES PRACTICE -- PAGE 1 OF 2

PRE-TESTING BECOMES PRACTICE

As the marketing value of television messages began to be recognized and the costs of airing and producing commercials increased, more attention was paid to researching commercials before they aired and before finished versions of them were produced. As a result, in the early 1970's G&R introduced In-View, which was the first real-world system to use invited viewing, which has become the recruitment standard for most on-air copy testing. The test commercials were still exposed on-air and at-home, but people were recruited to watch individual programs rather than being interviewed after they had stumbled across them as a part of their normal viewing habits. The benefit of invited viewing is that viewers could be found more economically but still be naive as to the purpose of the research. Additionally, advertisers could make economic spot buys rather than expensive national buys when they wanted to test commercials. A few years later, G&R used the advantages of In-View to become the first research company to test rough commercials on air. As a result, many advertisers expanded their testing activities.