reading-and-noting

Definition:
Studies that measure the average proportion of readers of a newspaper or magazine who actually paid attention to separate pages and even individual advertisements. The method was invented by Dr George GALLUP in the 1920s in the process of completing his PhD thesis, and subsequently made him a fortune. After a rival service was set up by Daniel STARCH, reading-and-noting became an accepted standard 'post-test' of ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS. It came to Britain in the 1940s. In an individual test, about 240 respondents are taken through a set of publications, page-by-page, soon after the day of issue. The criterion of effectiveness is thus RECALL. They must first prove that they did read the issue by spontaneously naming some of the contents. They are then asked a series of specific questions, the answers to which permit the computation of five separate measures: spread traffic, the proportion who looked at anything at all on a spread of two pages; page traffic, the proportion who looked at anything on a page; advertisement noting, the proportion who 'looked at' an advertisement; advertisement reading, the proportion who actually 'read most' of it, name noted, the proportion who noticed a brand name. The description reading and noting is thus back-to-front; 'reading' is the more significant measure. Publishers periodically conduct and publish their own reading-and-noting tests, particularly IPC magazines, Reader's Digest, the Financial Times and the Observer. Accumulated over time, reading-and-noting results permit computation of average impact figures for various advertisement types, all other things being equal. For example the average noting score for a DOUBLE-PAGE SPREAD in a magazine is 60 to 65 per cent, for a colour page in a magazine 50 to 60 per cent and for a black-and-white page in a newspaper also 50 to 60 per cent.

Cross-References:
[advertising effectiveness] [Starch, Dr Daniel] [Gallup] [recall] [hierarchy-of-effects] [double page spread (DPS)]

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