1 5 18 Miracles of research dvertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals A who ignore decodes of enemy signals. Before I became a copywriter, I was a researcher. I delivered the first paper on copy-testing in the history of British advertising. Later I ran Dr. Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in Princeton, predicting how many people would see movies before they were produced, measuring the ability of the stars to sell tickets at the box office, and so on. The best fun I ever had was in the early days of Ogilvy & Mather, when I was both Research Director and Creative Director. On Friday afternoons I wrote research reports to the Creative Director. On Monday mornings I changed hats, read my reports and decided what to do about them – if anything. In due course I was able to afford the services of Stanley Canter, a far better researcher. It took Stanley only ten days to get me out of his department. Like I always say, hire people who are better than you are. Here are 18 of the miracles research can perform for you: 1 It can measure the reputation of your company among consumers, security analysts, government officials, newspaper editors, the academic community. 2 Using mathematical models, research can estimate the sales of new products, and the advertising expenditures required to achieve maximum profits. The Hendry, Assessor, Sprinter, ESP and News models are sufficiently reliable to tell you whether your product warrants the expense of test marketing. (About 60 per cent of new products fail in test markets.) 3 Research can get consumer reactions to a new product when it is still