Overview of advert studies

Overview Of  Advert Studies

Creative television adverts 'make us more susceptible to sales messages'

There was a study that challenges the assumption that advertisements with lots of emotional content encourage viewers to look at them more closely.
In fact, we are more likely to scrutinise fact-based adverts so we can ''counter-argue'' what we are being told, the study by the University of Bath claims.
The likeable, entertainment-based ads that bring our guard down make viewers more relaxed and suggestible to the pitch
The team in the study used an eye-tracking device to measure the real-time attention paid to a range of adverts with different levels of emotional content.
The adverts were embedded in an episode of the sitcom Frasier and participants were unaware that advertising was the subject of the research.
Results showed that viewers paid less attention to likeable, creative adverts, and more attention to factual information-giving adverts, even when they did not like them.
Dr. Heath, from the university's School of Management, said: ''There has been a lot of research which shows that creative TV ads are more effective than those which simply deliver information, and it has always been assumed that it is because viewers pay more attention to them.
He went on to say that ''In a relaxed situation like TV watching, attention tends to be used mainly as a defense mechanism. If an ad bombards us with new information, our natural response is to pay attention so we can counter-argue what it is telling us. On the other hand, if we feel we like and enjoy an ad, we tend to be more trustful of it and therefore we don't feel we need to pay too much attention to it. The sting in the tail is that by paying less attention, we are less able to counter-argue what the ad is communicating. In effect we let our guard down and leave ourselves more open to the advertiser's message.”
This study suggests that an advert that is more informational may push the viewer to counter argue the statements it males and thus cause the audience to have a negative view of the product or service whereas creative adverts that an audience pays less attention to will not cause this to happen and so it is more likely for the viewer to identify the product or service positively which increases the chance of their purchase.

 Slogan Effectiveness Study

A slogan is a form of verbal logo. It usually appears just beneath or beside the brand name or logo. A slogan sums up what a product stands for, its specialty, the benefits, its marketing position, and its commitment. It is especially useful to reinforce a product’s identity. A slogan can prove to be more powerful than a logo. People can remember and recite your slogan while they are unlikely to doodle a logo. It is more important for a slogan to clearly state what you are about than to be clever, but if you can accomplish both, all the better. Slogans have two basic purposes: to provide continuity to a series of ads in a campaign and to reduce an advertising message strategy to a brief, repeatable, and memorable positioning. Adverts are known for using imperatives, if a company tells it’s consumers what it wants them to do it is more likely that they do it since there is a sense of command and urgency in the core authoritative tone which signals the viewer to obey and spend their money on the ‘ever so wonderful’ product or service.

The slogan should be used everywhere. Think of it as being attached to the product’s name like a shadow.

An advertising slogan is usually epigrammatic in nature. It helps to make the advert more impressive and memorable.

Slogans work at different levels; at a phonological level there can be a use of rhyme and rhyming with the brand name. At a lexical level the can be a use of coined words, the use of ‘every’ or ‘always’ and there can be the use of ‘no’ and ‘none’. At a syntactic level there can be a use of short and simple sentence, use of tense and use of questions. At a semantic level there can be a use of semantic ambiguity and of puns. There needs to be a combination of these different ideas for an advert to be successful

Number of words in a slogan	Number of adverts using a slogan
1	1
2	7
3	25
4	33
5	12
6	14
7	3
8	5
9	2
13	1

Advert slogans should be neat, simple, original, strategic and memorable. After a study of 103 ad slogans of large to medium sized companies in recent years, here are some summarised pieces information. The reason for choosing large to medium sized companies is that good ad slogans generally come from them and they can represent the trend in ad slogans.

From this chart we can see that three-worded slogans and four-worded slogans are the most favoured in the creation of a slogan and five or six worded slogans are also widely used. Two worded and eight worded slogans still occupy a share but the number of other length slogans decreased dramatically. The longest ad slogan in study has 13 words which is a rare case, because it is too lengthy, which makes it hard to remember. One worded slogans cannot express fully the rich and multi-layered meaning that a slogan wants to convey. Correspondingly, the reason why the eight worded slogans are preferred than the seven worded ones is because the former generally uses a parallel or contrasted structure, so for each small sentence of the structure the length is just four words which is the most preferred length. The average length of an ad slogan is 4.447 words. It is the trend for the slogan to be short, about 2 to 6 words long.

 

 

The Methodology:

There has been a research study comprised of a number of stages. The first stage was qualitative. Groups of viewers were interviewed about different types of TV content and their relationship to that content. They were also questioned at length about several, live TV sponsorships and television sponsorship overall. An online quantitative survey was then used to assess 1,600 respondents’ attitudes to a number of brands and live sponsorships, focussing in particular on their attitudes to brands, their awareness, how the sponsorships related to the advertisers and the programmes. The perceptions of both the programme and the sponsor were examined to see how closely the two were aligned and if any transfer of personalities had occurred. A wide range of sponsoring brands and categories were included in the study including Domino’s and The Simpsons, Toyotal Aygo and T4, Loose Women and Maltesers, Wrigleys and Hollyoaks, Bombadier English Bitter and Al Murray’s Happy Hour, Pedigree and Dog Rescue, and Comparethemarket.com and Channel 4 Drama. Next we conducted a lab-test to examine how the sponsorship bumpers, and particularly the creativity of the bumpers, worked in relation to standard spot advertising.
Finally, a relatively new technique, Implicit Attitude Testing (IAT), was employed to test how sponsorships affected respondents on a sub-conscious level.   The technique is known as ‘Blink’ and helps reveal the strength of automatic association we have between concepts that we are unable to reveal on a conscious, rational level.   In this case, it pitched competing brands against one another to assess how they performed against several key measures.  It was ideal for assessing how sponsorships had shaped implicit associations of brands that would usually be unreachable through more cognitive based research methods.  

The Results:

1) Sponsorship works most effectively on the implicit/emotional mind

Perhaps the most fundamental finding is that sponsorship has a far more profound effect on the emotional, implicit mind than on the rational/conscious mind.  This is unsurprising when you consider the shorter time-lengths of sponsorship messages. The lab test confirmed that sponsorship bumpers do not convey significant levels of brand information or instil particularly high levels of emotion in the viewer even when they are creatively linked to the programme and placed within the right context. Instead their power comes from the association made between the sponsor and the programme (thus making it more difficult to track).  
The qualitative work confirmed this.  Sponsorship is very much an accepted part of the television landscape.  Overall, viewers appreciate sponsorship’s role as ‘break punctuation’ and have a more positive view of sponsorship than of spot advertising.  Spot ads are viewed as a ‘harder sell’ whereas in many cases, sponsorship is seen as divorced from the ad break – many respondents failed to distinguish it from the programme and felt it acted as a marker and set the tone for the coming programme.

2) The viewer’s relationship with the programme is key

The stronger the viewer’s relationship is with a programme, the more effective sponsorship is in driving positive emotions towards the brand.   Fans of programmes were more likely to like the sponsor of their favourite programmes than less involved viewers. Intention to purchase increased by up to 9% for fans (4% on average), brand favourability rose by up to 8.5% (4% on average) and how ‘for-me’ respondents perceived the sponsors to be rose by up to 12% (5% on average).
Unsurprisingly, the way that advertiser entered into the programme-viewer relationship was an integral part of the sponsorships’ success.

Bumpers need to facilitate the relationship between the brand and programme

The best results come about when the sponsorship bumpers successfully introduced the brand into the emotional relationship that the viewer had with their programme. Where there was a more of an obvious link between a sponsorship bumper’s creative content and the programme content, the brand performed better across all the key measures.  Likewise, when there was a more obvious link between the brand itself and the programme, the brand performed better. If this link was not as obvious, then the sponsorship creative needed to work harder to establish the link or the sponsorship needed time and repetition in order to embed in viewers’ minds.

Sponsorship shouldn’t be measured and appreciated in the same way as spot advertising

Given that sponsorship works through its association with the programme and that the effects are felt most strongly on the emotional and implicit mind, then tradition explicit, recall-based methods of evaluation are destined to fall short of the mark. For this reason, the value of sponsorship could be slipping below the measurement radar and perhaps most importantly, advertisers could be failing to optimise the impact of their investment. 

Summary

In summary, Thinkbox’s work with Duckfoot demonstrated what many suspected – that sponsorship has a far greater impact on our implicit mind and emotions that on our rationale and consciousness. Sponsorship can affect how viewers feel about brands, how relevant they perceive them to be, their likelihood to buy and ultimately it grants a degree of stature and legitimacy to brands in a way that only television can.   Sponsorships work harder over the long-term, particularly where the ‘fit’ between the programme and brand is less obvious. But ultimately, new or old, the relationship between the viewer, the brand and the programme is crucial and the sponsorship bumper is the key component in facilitating and maintaining the relationship between the three facets.   When these elements harmonise, the impact on the brand can be significant.