Is anybody paying attention?
In the US and beyond, advertisers are starting to pay attention to ‘attention – the fact that simply buying ad exposures, or impressions, isn’t enough. If the targeted prospect doesn’t pay attention to the ad, it might as well never have appeared in their field of vision. Within the past year, the ARF has co-sponsored research and published numerous papers on the topic, while in the UK, a consortium of researchers has created The...
Opportunities and Risks in Audio Advertising
If you are an advertiser who wants to reach today’s Millennials, audio platforms – to include old fashioned ‘terrestrial’ radio and newer streaming options and podcasts are a great place to be. As Millennials, along with other age cohorts, increasingly engage with music or other content while they’re on the move, audio has assumed a stronger role in many cross-platform media plans. Of course, the audio environment is hugely...
Super Bowl Advertising through a System 1 Lens
Super Bowl Advertising through a System 1 Lens What if the real winners of the Super Bowl advertising competition weren’t the ones that aired the most original, the funniest, most emotional, most talked about ads? What if the winners weren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest name celebrities or celebrity directors or the biggest production budgets? What if the winners were the ads that actually built the brand in ways that...
Emotion in Advertising – You Get What You Measure For
‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it’ (widely attributed to Peter Drucker) and its corollary ‘What gets measured gets done’ are playing out in today’s advertising environment. As we look back over the past decade, much has changed about advertising – both the media environment and the increasing level of consumer choice in whether they watch the ads at all. Much has also changed in advertising research – notably, shifting...
Not Again! Same ad, over and over…?
In a recent Xandr study, 75% of the 2,004 consumers surveyed said they think advertising has become more frequent lately – and a nearly equal number (73%) said that seeing an ad too many times makes them dislike it. It’s been well-documented, by Communicus and others, that when a consumer sees 2 or 3 different ads within a campaign, in-market results on key performance indicators are significantly stronger than when that consumer sees...
In Branding, Timing is Everything
‘Timing is everything’ holds true in much of life, and producing well-branded advertising is no exception. When it comes to video ads, the worst thing you can do is wait until the end to introduce your brand or its distinctive brand assets. Studies1 of brain activity have identified a phenomenon termed ‘conceptual closure’: one to two second drops in attention and long-term memory encoding at event boundaries, e.g., often the...