Which Ads Will Score Among Super Bowl Viewers?

FLEMINGTON, N.J., Jan. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- HCD Research announced today that it will once again conduct a national study the night of the Super Bowl to rate the commercials and announce the winning ads early Monday morning.

The company will report the ad testing results on its mediacurves.com web site at 6:30 a.m. the morning of February 4. To view last year's winning Super Bowl ads, go to www.mediacurves.com

The two-phase research will consist of an initial qualitative phase in which a panel of noted ad agency executives, advertising professors and industry professionals will view each commercial during the game. After viewing the commercials, they will rank the top 20 advertisements using various parameters including:

    -- Breakthrough
    -- Emotion
    -- Memorability
    -- Involvement

Each commercial will be assigned a value based on the mean of the responses for each advertisement.

The top 20 advertisements in phase one will be inserted into a web survey and sent to a national representative sample of more than 2,000 participants. In this phase, responders will answer questions regarding their perceptions of the ads and will also utilize an automated response system which allows them to indicate their level of interest in half-second intervals as they watch a commercial.

According to Glenn Kessler, president and CEO, HCD Research, the company will use quantitative communication research techniques in which different segments of the national sample will view just one advertisement. "This approach is consistent and standard with quantitative advertising research," explained Kessler. "Using a large random sample of Americans and our state-of- the art research applications, we will accurately obtain Americans' reactions to the Super Bowl ads."

The results will be averaged for each half second and transformed into curves which indicate the portions of the commercial that generated high and low levels of interest. The curves will be used as part of a metric that will be calculated to rank the 20 advertisements and determine the winning 2008 Super Bowl advertisement.

HCD Research is a communications research company headquartered in Flemington, NJ. The company's services include traditional and web-based marketing and communications research. For additional information on HCD Research, access the company's web site at www.hcdi.net or call HCD Research at 908-788-9393.