Recall and Persuasiveness

In 'Measuring the Hidden Power of Emotive Advertising' Heath asserts: "The belief underlying recall-based metrics is that advertising has to be persuasive in order to be effective."
This is another of Heath's errors.
Data from Millward Brown shows that there is no correlation between the persuasiveness of an ad and its Awareness Index (their measure of the ad's memorability).
In other words, ad recall has nothing to do with ad persuasiveness.






A Millward Brown Admap paper "An analysis of how effectively advertising research can predict sales" reports that a higher Awareness Index is related to more enjoyable, more involving advertising, and shows from data (rather than argues from theory) that ads which focus on emotional content have higher Awareness Indices than ads with rational content.