How far should you go to test a product?

June 13th, 2008 at 08:40am Carrie Skogsberg

While recently browsing around the PRSA site we came across a rather startling article - the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer went overboard to test the success of advertising in their print and online publications. They ran fake ads for a made-up airline called Derrie-Air (ha ha!), a company that promises green flight practices based on the weight of the passengers. As Editor & Publisher Magazine reported Monday, a story in the Inquirer revealed that the ads for “Derrie-Air” drew a higher-than-usual response, with a 1.25-percent “click-through rate” for the online version, compared to a national click-through average of just 0.05 percent.

A little astounding? The reason the click-thru rates were so high was not only because of the power of print and online advertising - it was the message. If you name an airline “Derrie-Air,” people are going to look twice, which still shows how important messaging is in the industry.

Our issue with this is that a newspaper’s job is to inform its public with the facts - and even an advertising department needs to follow some ethics along those lines. Shouldn’t they be able to prove their success with their existing clients? Don’t they have to provide a return-on-investment for the costly price of advertising? If they want to sell ads they should be able to provide true statistics, not ones they had to create with a fake company.

In the end, it goes back to the core of public relations and marketing know-how - if you have the right message, people are going to listen, and maybe even get off of their “derrie-airs” and do something about it.

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