People don’t notice your Ads.
As the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute* famously revealed in its ’40/40′ study a few years back, only 40% of TV ads can be remembered the following day by consumers. And of that pitiful fraction, only 40% of those ads can be successfully attributed to the sponsoring brand behind it.
*(16% effectiveness is from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute study, quoted in ‘How Brands Grow’)
Multiply those depressing decimal points together and you discover that only 16% of advertising is remembered and correctly attributed. More importantly, 84% of advertising is a total waste of time.
The moral of this sad story is be less clever and much more distinctive in your ads but how… research can help.
Ipsos recently published a really rather wonderful report called ‘The power of you: Why distinctive brand assets are a driving force of creative effectiveness‘. It provides the results of a new study of more than 2,000 pieces of video advertising in America.
All of these ads were measured to see how many and which distinctive assets were used across these campaigns.
The first chart identifies what advertisers did
Percentage of ads that used brand assets
Source: Ipsos Creative Excellence Video Ad Meta-Analysis, 2,015 USA cases
Source: Ipsos Creative Excellence Video Ad Meta-Analysis, 2,015 USA casesAccording to Kahnemann’s System1 thinking theory distinctiveness is a critical way to cut through and get remembered
Likelihood of an ad featuring different brand asset types being HIGH performing on branded attention
Source: Ipsos Creative Excellence Video Ad Meta-Analysis, 2,015 USA cases
Source: Ipsos Creative Excellence Video Ad Meta-Analysis, 2,015 USA casesIn the next chart, above, you can see which types of distinctive asset generate the most positive impact on recall and brand attribution. Characters achieve a six-fold increase in the likelihood that the campaign will appear in the top third of the campaigns when ranked on recall and attribution. Celebrities then follow, then shapes, visual style and so on.
This, then, is a stunningly important chart. It tells you which assets to aim for if your work is going to stand out and be part of the 16% that is noticed and attributed, or the 84% that is…sorry, what was the question again?
This aligned with my posts from 2018 highlighting Byron Sharp’s their of mental availability
create distinctive icons- whether characters or … jingles!
Of all the distinctive assets you might want to employ, the Ipsos data suggests that a sonic cue – what we once called a jingle – might be the greatest code of them all. The Intel chime. The Old Spice whistle. The weird PlayStation thingy. These are the greatest distinctiveness boosts of them all.
One last thing… don’t have more than one message
Kantar Millward Brown analysis the Link ad test database
That’s how you get noticed… an annoying jingle, a distinctive character … aligned behind your business value to customers and consistently used.