Focus groups are a waste of perfectly good M&Ms.
But for clients it’s often a different story, since it is their money on the line. And when a client plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying up media space on TV, the risk, and therefore the extreme caution, is even greater.
Enter, Lisa Cochrane, SVP-Marketing at Allstate. She didn’t let data from creative testing get in her way, or the brand’s way. According to Ad Age, she fought for the “Mayhem” campaign, and fought to protect it from being focus grouped to death.
“There was a lot of internal pressure to kill it,” SVP-Marketing Lisa Cochrane recalled Friday in a presentation at the Association of National Advertisers annual meeting in Florida.
“I knew that ‘Mayhem’ was the right idea at the right time. I could feel it. We didn’t do any market testing or focus groups. I just asked myself, ‘Would I want to watch those ads?’ ”