MEASURING THE SIGNAL

This article attempts to offer a clear, standardized way to tell whether an advertisement placed in a professional journal is being noticed. Theory of Signal Detectability suggests using the "signal-to-noise" ratio to determine True Recognition, which is the percent who say they have seen an ad that really have seen it, minus the percent who say they have seen it who really have not. To test the practicality of the Signal Strength technique, a study was conducted with 31 primary care physicians (PCP). The 31 PCPs were split into two groups, designated the Hit group (16 doctors) and the False Alarm group (15). Certainty concerning Hits generally paralleled the percent of Hits overall. Certainty concerning the False Alarms was much lower, and became slightly higher as False Alarms increased, suggesting that the ads with the highest False Alarms create a false sense of confidence that they had been seen before.