Everybody can name an advert they still remember from years ago, and almost nobody can describe the ones they sat through last night. A lot of research has gone into why that is, and the most useful of it for anybody planning an advert is a study called Creative Drivers of Effectiveness, published by Thinkbox, the marketing body for commercial TV (so it has an interest in the answer). The research company Neuro-Insight measured viewers’ brain responses to 150 TV adverts, second by second, and compared what was happening on screen with what went into long-term memory.
Feelings do the remembering
The adverts people remember fondly are almost always the ones that made them feel something, whether that was a laugh, a lump in the throat or a moment of recognition. The study found that emotion mattered even in the most rational categories, and it turned up a useful detail along the way. Purely factual adverts were remembered well enough, but viewers didn’t warm to them, and being remembered without being liked is a poor return on your airtime.
The example everybody in advertising reaches for is Cadbury’s gorilla from 2007, which was ninety seconds of a gorilla playing the drums to a Phil Collins record, without a word of dialogue. Marketing Week’s account of how it was made has the marketing director who backed it describing it as the hardest thing he’d had to sell in his career, because it was longer than usual and had no chocolate and no message in it. People are still talking about it getting on for twenty years later, and most of them can still tell you it was for Cadbury.
It would be the wrong lesson to conclude that the product can be left out, though. Cadbury was already one of the best-known names in the country, and a business that viewers are meeting for the first time can’t count on them to fill in the gaps. What the gorilla shows is that an advert needs an idea at its centre that gives people a reason to care, and for most businesses that idea has to carry the name with it.
Make it an advert that could only be yours
We notice what’s unusual and ignore what’s familiar, so if every business in your sector advertises in the same way, with the same shots and the same sort of music, the surest way to be remembered is to do something else. It’s why one of the first things we do on any job is look at what your competitors are putting out. When Queen Alexandra Sixth Form asked us for an advert that was nothing like the school and college promos people are used to seeing, we combined a striking animation style with bold messaging and an electric track, and it stood out instantly when it was first broadcast.
Being different only helps if viewers remember who was being different, and that’s where one of the study’s most useful findings comes in. Adverts that wove the product into the story drew more moments of strong response from viewers than those that put the product front and centre, which the researchers put down to the guard people raise when they feel they’re being sold to. An advert that tells a story and then cuts to the product at the end has the opposite problem, because it leaves viewers with a story and nothing to attach it to.
The neatest example is the meerkats. In January 2009, Compare the Market was the fourth of four big price comparison sites, with a long name that people struggled to recall and rivals whose adverts all looked much alike. Its answer was a meerkat called Aleksandr, exasperated that people looking for cheap car insurance kept turning up at his own website, Compare the Meerkat. The joke is the brand name, so you can’t describe the advert to anybody without telling them who it was for.
That gives you a test for any script, which is to ask whether the advert would work as well for a competitor if you swapped the logo. If it would, the product isn’t doing enough, because the best ideas are the ones that could only be about you. It doesn’t take a talking animal to get there. In an advert we made for Motor Depot with their agency, PAB Studios, a funny situation plays out between a teacher and her class, and the way out of it is to buy a car from Motor Depot, so the humour and the selling arrive together.
Put people in it, and make it look and sound like you
Part of the reason that advert works is that it’s full of faces. We’re drawn to other people, and the study found that adverts with people in them felt more relevant to viewers, and were better remembered at the moment the brand appeared, than adverts made only of products and graphics.
Then there’s everything that’s recognisably yours. Your colours, your logo, a character, a line you always use or a piece of music all help people to file the advert under the right name, and they work better the more consistently you use them. In the study, working a brand’s colours into the advert lifted viewers’ emotional response to it, and colour does most when it’s part of the idea. Our animated advert for Hampson Hughes, made with the agency Global, takes place in a black and white world where the colour comes back when the firm gets involved, which meant the firm’s corporate colours could be part of the story.
Sound matters at least as much, because people look away from the screen during the break, to glance at their phones, talk to each other and put the kettle on, but they can still hear the television. So the things that matter most, starting with your name, should be said as well as shown, and an advert that only makes sense if you’re watching every frame is going to be missed by a lot of people. We’ve written a whole piece on the music side in sonic branding, and another on the slogans people remember longest.
Don’t rush the ending
All of that recognition is cashed in during the last few seconds, which is exactly when it’s tempting to squeeze in one more shot and flash the logo up at the very end. The research suggests that’s a mistake, because adverts that kept the final branding on screen for at least three seconds scored higher for memory, and higher still for how viewers felt about what they’d seen, than those that hurried past it.
The timing matters as much as the duration, and this is the least obvious finding in the study. When a story reaches its payoff, such as a punchline or a twist, the brain treats it as the end of a chapter and takes a moment to file away what it has seen, and for that moment it takes in very little. If your name appears just then, straight after the joke lands, a lot of viewers will miss it. The answer is either to land the payoff a few seconds before the branding, or to make the brand part of the payoff, which is one more argument for an idea that can’t be separated from the business.
Those closing seconds are also where your web address, your supers and your sonic logo tend to live, so the ending needs planning as carefully as anything that comes before it.
Then be consistent
No advert becomes memorable from being seen once. The ones that stay with us are the ones that kept turning up, looking and sounding like themselves, over months and years. The Andrex puppy first appeared on television in 1972 and has been part of the brand ever since, and the meerkats were still on air well over a decade after their first appearance. Neither would be remembered now if its owners had tired of it after one campaign, which is always the temptation, because you’ll have seen your own advert a great many times before most of your customers have properly noticed it. A good idea that you stick with will always beat a brilliant one you drop after six weeks.
How we use all this
None of it is a formula, and following every point won’t guarantee a great advert, not least because the gorilla ignored about half of them. But it’s a very good checklist, and we go through it on every script before a camera comes out. You can see what that looks like in practice in some of our work, or ask us for a free storyboard and see it applied to your own business.