Rich Thau is the president and founder of Presentation Testing, Inc. His company is the industry leader in scientifically testing and refining the effectiveness of business and advocacy presentations.  Simply, he makes sure that ads work. I interviewed him to find out more about dial testing.

1. What exactly is “dial testing?”

Dial testing is the process by which researchers gather moment-to-moment feedback from audiences using audience-controlled hand-held dials. Audiences watch some continuous stimulus material, such as a speech, presentation, or debate, and turn the dials to register on a zero-to-100 scale how much they agree/disagree, or believe/disbelieve, or understand/don’t understand, etc., in real time. We use the feedback to ask focus group participants WHY they reacted as they did to particular snippets, so we can refine the message in the future.

2. How many other firms do dial testing?

There are about 150 companies that own the dial testing system we own, called the Perception Analyzer.

3. How did you come to own and run your own firm? What did you do before this?

I started Presentation Testing in 2001. Prior to that I ran a non-profit think tank called Third Millennium, and before that I was a trade magazine journalist. I wanted to see if I could successfully run a for-profit business after running a non-profit for almost a decade.

4. What does your typical day look like?

No day is typical. Some days I’m on the road visiting clients (most of whom are in DC). Some days I’m executing dial tests in various focus group facilities around the U.S. Some days I work from my home office outside Philadelphia. And some days I work in my NYC office.

5. How do clients usually find your firm?

Clients tend to find us by word of mouth at this point, as well as by viewing research findings presentations that I’ll deliver in DC to people from a variety of businesses or associations.

6. Have you worked on any ads that we would recognize?

Probably not; most of our testing is not for advertising, but for public policy messaging that is used by trade associations in their op-eds, testimony, white papers, press releases, etc.. If you ever saw a TV infomercial for a personal training tool called “The Bean,” we did test that.

7. Who are your biggest clients?

Our biggest clients are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable.

8. What is involved in a typical dial test?

In a typical dial test session to test some public policy messaging, we have 10-12 people in a session, and will conduct two-to-four sessions per city. Each session might feature a different political ideology of the participants, so one group will be Republicans, one Independents, and one Democrats, for example.

We typically find them through the focus group facilities we use, which also do recruiting for us. Participants get paid $75 for two hours, and the recruiters typically get paid between $85 and $115 for each person they recruit.

9. How do you ensure that your select group of people turning the dials are rep-resentative of the population you are trying to gauge?

We screen participants in advance to make sure they fit the profiles that matter to our clients.

10. What is the best piece of business advice you were ever given? And what piece of advice would you give to a young person who wanted to go into message testing?

The best pieces of business advice I have been given are:

1) Stay focused. Key your eye on what’s important, not merely what’s urgent.

2) Do what you love and the money will follow.

3) Don’t micromanage people. Give them a task and good directions. If they fail, let them go. If they succeed, promote them.

4) Spend your 20s experimenting with careers, but by the time you’re 30, have a direction and stick with it.

5) Find where your disparate interests overlap (like in a Venn diagram), and forge a new path if you’re at all entrepreneurial. My college roommate has always loved sports, medicine, and kids. What’s his job? He’s now one of the nation’s experts in pediatric sports medicine.

6) When knocked down, don’t stay down. Life is too short to wallow in your failures–get back up and keep marching!

I’d advise someone who wants to go into message testing to make sure they spend a lot of time getting to know the industries/fields where they’d be doing the testing. I watch C-SPAN for fun, and have been fascinated by politics since I was a child. It’s not work for me to track what’s going on in public policy; it’s what I love doing and it’s what makes me pretty good at it.

Also, I suggest they read Frank Luntz’s book, “Words that Work.” If they don’t find it fascinating, they shouldn’t go into the field.

(Image credit: Presentation Testing, Inc and itri )